A little man came round to value the house where I'm living today. He was a mousy small man with a round, ruddy face and bright little eyes that totted up the value of everything as he spoke. He was wearing a suit that was probably expensive and made to fit him perfectly but he still looked awkward in it, as though his skin itself was a little too tight.
It was obscenely early (About 9.15am in normal-people time) and I had to haul myself out of my pit where I had been having a pleasingly weird dream about the film Brazil.
Nina answered the door -- Tina was at the doctors getting the last of her innoculations for their trip. Africa is a bugger in terms of needles in your arm -- and they soon did the traditional Bonding Ritual Of All Northerners In Southern Wimpy Tosser Country, by talking about the areas of Leeds they knew. Then they moved onto travelling and Nina found out that he'd been in south-east Asia for a couple of years, travelling in Cambodia, Vietnam, Australia and so on and working mostly round Hong Kong. She asked him what his favourite part was.
"The money," he said.
So, it wasn't seeing Angkor Watt then.
Wanker. *g*
I have to work tonight. It's not my weekday job, it's working on the Obs, which I am doing for the money every Saturday this month.
I am number two on the night production desk, which will entail masses of hassle and being shouted at by the editor, then being shouted at by the deputy editor, who is Scrappy Doo incarnate. I don't want to do it. I hate it. I'll be there until 1.30am. But there are big bills to be paid and it's a good gig.
Yesterday my dad told me to 'forget about the money and get a life for Christ's sake'.
I'm thinking that's not good. I'm thinking he's right. I wish I were braver about these things.
I read a review of the piss-poor British version of Survivor in Uncut yesterday that got it just right on why Survivor failed here and Big Brother succeeded and it was the opposite way round in the US:
"Survivor was doomed because ... [gratuitous insult omitted] we're NOT AMERICANS: its success over in the States was entirely fitting for a nation whose frontier spirit can only find real succour in watching systems analysts build makeshift huts out of animal dung ad garotte squirrels from a safe distance (somewhere between Tom Hanks and Ted Nugent lies the soul of the US version).
"Over here the reason our reality shows work (Big Brother/Popstars) is because they rely on our best national characteristics - flirtiness, spite and getting absolutely shitfaced at every spare opportunity."
There you go: Most web journallers find wisdom and deep meaning in poetry. I find it in snarky reviews of shite videos of even shiter TV shows. *g*
So, I heard about all the XF spoilers. And after very brief pondering I find I am in agreement with C: A resounding what-the-hell-ever.
I can't even get up the energy to burn CC in effigy. *g*
I still love the idea of it. I still maintain that in those first seven years you'll find some of the best episodic TV ever made. But the passionate engagement with the TV show is gone; with all TV shows really, as there's nothing that takes its place, even though I think Buffy, West Wing, Cold Feet and so on are fantastic.
That's a very good thing.
Still love the fic though.
...
It was obscenely early (About 9.15am in normal-people time) and I had to haul myself out of my pit where I had been having a pleasingly weird dream about the film Brazil.
Nina answered the door -- Tina was at the doctors getting the last of her innoculations for their trip. Africa is a bugger in terms of needles in your arm -- and they soon did the traditional Bonding Ritual Of All Northerners In Southern Wimpy Tosser Country, by talking about the areas of Leeds they knew. Then they moved onto travelling and Nina found out that he'd been in south-east Asia for a couple of years, travelling in Cambodia, Vietnam, Australia and so on and working mostly round Hong Kong. She asked him what his favourite part was.
"The money," he said.
So, it wasn't seeing Angkor Watt then.
Wanker. *g*
I have to work tonight. It's not my weekday job, it's working on the Obs, which I am doing for the money every Saturday this month.
I am number two on the night production desk, which will entail masses of hassle and being shouted at by the editor, then being shouted at by the deputy editor, who is Scrappy Doo incarnate. I don't want to do it. I hate it. I'll be there until 1.30am. But there are big bills to be paid and it's a good gig.
Yesterday my dad told me to 'forget about the money and get a life for Christ's sake'.
I'm thinking that's not good. I'm thinking he's right. I wish I were braver about these things.
I read a review of the piss-poor British version of Survivor in Uncut yesterday that got it just right on why Survivor failed here and Big Brother succeeded and it was the opposite way round in the US:
"Survivor was doomed because ... [gratuitous insult omitted] we're NOT AMERICANS: its success over in the States was entirely fitting for a nation whose frontier spirit can only find real succour in watching systems analysts build makeshift huts out of animal dung ad garotte squirrels from a safe distance (somewhere between Tom Hanks and Ted Nugent lies the soul of the US version).
"Over here the reason our reality shows work (Big Brother/Popstars) is because they rely on our best national characteristics - flirtiness, spite and getting absolutely shitfaced at every spare opportunity."
There you go: Most web journallers find wisdom and deep meaning in poetry. I find it in snarky reviews of shite videos of even shiter TV shows. *g*
So, I heard about all the XF spoilers. And after very brief pondering I find I am in agreement with C: A resounding what-the-hell-ever.
I can't even get up the energy to burn CC in effigy. *g*
I still love the idea of it. I still maintain that in those first seven years you'll find some of the best episodic TV ever made. But the passionate engagement with the TV show is gone; with all TV shows really, as there's nothing that takes its place, even though I think Buffy, West Wing, Cold Feet and so on are fantastic.
That's a very good thing.
Still love the fic though.
...
Comments
(I've been trying to figure out a way I can discuss new episodes of my favorite shows without spoiling them, and I can't. I mean, I can do the font color = background color thing so that people have to highlight the sections to read them, but that only works for my journal. In other people's friends' lists, the text shows up.)
C.J. Cherryh, one of my favorite authors, has a habit of ending books happily or semi-hopefully and then coming back with a sequel that blows the happiness out of the water. It works. It works because she picks up on things you didn't notice in the earlier books but which logically lead to this event, or because she brings in another set of aliens or political parties or whatever which you haven't seen before but which are complex enough and convincing enough to make you think: "Well, that's how history happens. Bunch of Mongols you've never heard sweeping over Europe, bunch of Europeans you've never seen before deciding to colonize your continent."
Probably my favorite of these is the duology that ends pretty happily with the protagonists escaping an even worse fate by signing up with the merchant fleet. She's never written a sequel to it, so you have to have read the other books in her Future History to realize the poor suckers have signed up for a decades-long losing war, in which they'll be inadequately funded and misunderstood by their parent company and hated and distrusted by the people around them.
I give an evil cackle just thinking about it.
Anyway. It's not the plot spoilers that upset me (though I'm not exactly *happy* with them). They *sound* like they might be a logical outgrowth of threads left dangling last season, though I will undoubtedly change my mind about this once the episode airs and it becomes clear that 1013 is up to its usual habit of throwing in anything new they can think of instead of actually following through on established opportunities. (This habit is detrimental to the quality of the series itself, ultimately, but a great enabler of fan fiction.)
What really pisses me off is Scully *once again* sobbing in Doggett's arms. Like, hello, stoic reserve, where did you go? I miss you!
Bet you ten bucks that someone or other will post to axfa in outrage about the "betrayal" of the ending of "Existence," not to mention the incoherence of the episode plot. Because the mytharc episodes are usually so logical, and we've never ever seen 1013 take a happy ending and twist it back into angst before.