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a COMPLAINT
all right FINE after attempting EVERY POSSIBLE LEGAL METHOD & (let’s be honest) a couple of quasi-legal methods of streaming Leverage, i have BOUGHT NOT ONLY THE DVDS BUT ALSO A PORTABLE DVD/BLU-RAY PLAYER SO I CAN WATCH IT WHILE USING THE EXERCISE CYCLE, GOD DAMN IT
i feel that this is SOMEWHAT OVER THE TOP and should not have been A NECESSARY STEP for watching 12 YEAR OLD TV in THIS THE YEAR OF OUR LORD TWO THOUSAND TWENTY
i also bought The Librarians and Alias for good measure because IN FOR A LAMB, LADS, IN FOR A FRIGGIN LAMB
otoh the portable dvd/blu-ray player does open up our entire catalog of TV On DVD to watch, which means i might actually get around to watching the entire series of X-Files that I bought before streaming was really a thing, & it won’t pause while waiting for our network to work. and in fact, if i can hack it to watch our american DVDs i might even re-watch Highlander. SO THERE.
(i have entire seasons’ worth of Supernatural tweets to turn into a blog post, maybe, but also…maybe not… :))
ETA: in the time between starting to write this post and now (my computer froze up so I couldn’t post it), I’ve discovered that my old computer has a DVD player, so I’ve returned the dvd/blu-ray player & am using the computer, which has a much larger screen, to watch X-Files. Well. Two episodes, so far, anyway. :)
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nano: halfway mark + gym, tv, & life
I’m supposed to be at 45K on Project One for November. I’m at 29K and have to revise again, but after two days of grim effort I may actually have a plot now, which should help. :P Technically I guess I still really only need 4K a day to make goal by the end of the month, but IDK if I’ll get there.
I haven’t gone back to Project Two yet. Project Three is underway in terms of layout. Waiting on the cover art for it, which is going to be AMAZING and I can’t wait to show it to you. (You all wanted a new CE Murphy book for the holidays, right?) I haven’t gotten any farther on Project Four, either, although I should do a bit more of it tonight, maybe. It’s kind of fun. Realistically I’m not going to get to Project Five this month, but that’s okay. REDEEMER, having been assigned Project number Six, will get delivered instead, and that’s…yeah. Very important.
Meanwhile I still have a cold, or, I think, have a second one that landed right on top of the first, so in many ways the fact that I’m doing anything at all is admirable. I’ve even gone to the gym twice this week, although in both cases I did my “lie on the floor” workout, which I could obviously do at home but don’t. I guess the important part about going to the gym is there’s nothing else to do there but exercise, and also one vaguely supposes people might eye you, if you just lie on the floor for twenty minutes without moving. (I don’t actually think they do. I don’t think most people pay much attention to what other people are doing at the gym. But one might be able to use the idea of it for motivation.)
The “lie on the floor” workout is actually a fairly decent little Pilates For People Who Aren’t Fit Enough To Do Beginner Pilates (aka Pilates For Weenies) that I’ve worked up. If I had any kind of video editing skills I might try to do a video of it for people, although that supposes anybody would want to use a tubby lady’s workout video instead of a slim fit lady’s workout video. (IDK, sometimes I think that’d be less depressing. Although I also suppose there are probably *many* exercise videos out there featuring women who are not slim and fit. I just haven’t looked for them.) Anyway. I’m tired.
I love STAR TREK: DISCOVERY and am howling in agony over there being a mid-season break. It’s on Netflix! I’m not supposed to have to WAIT for it! I also love THE GIFTED, although I’ve only seen the first 3 episodes, I think. But it hit the ground running, and it has *BLINK*! And she’s PERFECT! *flails*! And I continue to love SUPERGIRL and I wish I was writing LEGENDS OF TOMORROW because I feel I could navigate the border between absurd and stupid better than they’re doing. It’s amazing how unimpressed I am with the bad guy featured thus far on THE FLASH, but I will be here until the end for Michael Emerson as !EvilFinch on ARROW because OMG!EVILFINCH. And I just started watching THE GOOD PLACE, which I have it on good authority will eventually be an incandescent spot in my life but which is so far merely cute and amusing.
That was a lot of TV to report on. IDK what else I’ve got, in the general life department. I’m terrible at meditating. I read Carol Berg’s DUST & LIGHT / ASH & SILVER duology and they were amazing. Book two made me clutch my heart and gasp out loud in horror. It was very dramatic. :) I’ve got a GGK book that’s been on the shelf forever as my next should-read, but I always fall into a pit of despair when I read him because I can’t do what he does and so I try not to read his books while I’m actively writing (which is why I’m so far behind, sigh). Oh, and I picked up a SF thing that looked appealing and about 95% of it is, but it’s written in a deliberately noir way (which was part of the appeal) up to and including really kind of painful sexism, which I suspect is purposeful because it’s So Noir, but it’s also…I stopped reading it a few days ago and I don’t really think I’m going to pick it up again, so. *sigh*
Anyway, time to study Irish now. (It’s going very badly indeed. :))
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ST:TOS: Man Trap & Charlie X
At the beginning of July all the Star Trek episodes became available on Netflix. I let out a squee heard ’round the world (it was, too, thanks to Twitter), because I’ve been wanting to watch it with Indy; I was a little younger than he was when I watched pretty well the entire original series (the, er, only series, at that point), and I think it’s a pretty great age to be introduced to Trek.
The non-Kirk pilot is not included, and the episodes are presented by air date rather than production date, which is…pretty clearly not ideal, but I’m not dedicated enough (especially since I’m watching with Indy) to hop around and watch them in production order.
So the story starts in media res with the pretty awful and yet in moments brilliant “The Man Trap,” where a salt-desperate alien able to take on the form of anybody that someone thinks strongly enough about kills several Enterprise crewmen in an attempt to survive. There are sexual politics at once embarrassing and not too horrible for their time, but the thing I liked most was how sympathetically, in the end, the alien was presented: she was the last of her species, not *bad*, but trying to survive. And there’s a straight-up amazing moment when she transforms into McCoy, and Deforest Kelly’s body language flawlessly mimics the actress playing the alien’s. My hat is off, sir.
The alien’s real, monstrous form, once revealed, was sufficiently scary to Indy that he told me he didn’t want to watch any more of that show, and (before he was in any danger of going to sleep) that he had had a bad dream about it. Fortunately, we’d bought a dreamcatcher for him while in North Carolina, so I put that up and all was well.
This morning he asked quite eagerly if we were going to watch more of Star Trak tonight. :)
So tonight we watched the second (aired) episode, “Charlie X,” and hot damn, people, Captain James T Kirk gives a straight-up lesson in consent to the teenage guest star in that episode:
Kirk: It’s not a one-way street, how you feel & that’s all. It’s how she feels, too. If she feels anything for you at all, you’ll know it. There are a million things in this universe you can have & a million things you can’t. It’s no fun facing that, but it’s the way things are.
I knew, in fact, that Kirk was generally a lot more progressive & outspoken about womens’ rights than his reductive image has made him. But the SECOND EPISODE. That was awesome. Also awesome is that I paused it there to ask Indy what had happened:
Me: Does he like that girl?
Indy: Yeah.
Me: Does she like him?
Indy: No.
Me: So what does that mean?
Indy: He should leave her alone!Leaving me w/this cross sense of
1. My 6 year old gets this, &
2. Aren’t geeks supposed to admire/emulate Kirk? HERE’S A NUMBER TAKE A CLUEAnyway, aside from excellent unexpected consent lessons, “Charlie X” is a really, *really* good episode. It’s chock full of behavioural lessons and impossible quandaries both for the crew and the guest star, and yeah, wow, that one knocked it right out of the park. (It was written by a woman, DC Fontana, and now I’m really looking forward to seeing more of her episodes.)
(Kirk’s costume changed almost every time he left the room and came back again. I noticed it, pointed it out to Indy, and Indy noticed it after that. :) But wow, the remastered colors! Some of those shirts really ARE green! And oh my, the dramatic lights falling across the eyes in key and tense moments… ♥ :))
(Also, oh, my, yes, Uhura really does flirt with Spock from the outset! I love it!)
(And the crew IS multi-ethnic! And there are women wearing pants! And…! ♥!!!!)
Indy is looking forward to watching the next eposide tomorrow. ♥!
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Picoreview: NCIS Season 10
Picoreview: NCIS Season 10 (and the first 2 eps of s11): …that was actually really, really good.
I mean, NCIS is a solid show. It’s generally of reasonably high quality and consistency, with very few actively bad episodes and correspondingly few really *good* ones. The actors are all appealing and their interactions are terrific, and the whole thing lends itself to the sense of family that it’s supposed to. The season started out with plenty of AUGH, between the bombing and (much more alarmingly) Ducky’s heart attack, but every season starts with AUGH and most of them don’t hold on to the AUGH through as much of the season as s10 did.
“The Namesake,” guest starring Billy Dee Williams, is one of the exceptional episodes, as are many of the NCIS father/children episodes (“You Better Watch Out,” with Tony’s father, and “Squall,” with McGee’s previously-never-seen-father, are also good this season), but it’s the Ziva storyline that absolutely rocks the season. Literally: it gives the show a massive shake-up mid-season that follows through into the 2nd episode of the 11th season, and…
(spoilers, mostly about Tony and Ziva, behind the cut)
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house hunting
We’ve been house hunting. I feel like I’ve been doing nothing at all work-wise (that’s because I’ve been doing nothing at all work-wise) and I feel like I don’t know what I HAVE been doing, although house hunting has been part of it.
We went to look at a ridiculously cool place today. I mean, it’s literally a Georgian manor house. It’s not a BIG manor house (4br), but it’s literally a Georgian manor house and it’s on about an acre and is in the middle of a city. I’ve been saying that all I really want is to live on a country estate in the middle of a city. This is as close as is humanly possible (without winning the lotto). The estate agent liked us, so we’ll see if we get the place.
Otherwise…I haven’t gotten any more packing, or purging, or…*anything*…done. Except we finished watching season 2 of The 100, which, holy shit. I say again, holy shit! We got to the part that a friend spoiled for me like EIGHT MONTHS AGO and I was like O.O because I knew what was going to happen but not how, and then holy shit, it just got more intense from there. Wow. The worldbuilding is still terrible but it’s one of the best SF shows on TV right now. I mean, like, if I had to cut down to only two shows, I’d be watching it and The Flash.
Yeah. Okay. I’m up too late so I have to go to bed, but I wanted to give some indication that I was still alive. :)
