screw you

So I read Turn Coat last night, which was awesome as I've come to expect from the Dresden books. Somehow, Butcher always manages to bring it in a major league way. Seriously people, you should start reading them, they are delicious fictional crack and will make you happy. Sadly at least part of all three of my 3 fic ideas are totally jossed by the events of the book. But the events were worth being jossed by, even if sad.

This year, I finally attempted a seder of my own (after planning to for like 3 years and flaking or giving in to family pressure). It could have gone better; it could have gone worse. It was just Jeremy and I and sophia_helix and actoplasm, which was good in the sense of my only having a very small table, but weird in that I was the only one who'd ever been to a seder before. I felt sort of awkward, at least until the wine kicked in.

On BPAL news, I definitely need to swap my Bhagdad for one that is more spicy. Lady Macbeth, Frumious Bandersnatch, and March Hare are all lovely on me. Juke Joint smells great in the bottle but turned sort of baby powdery on me, losing it's refreshing edge. I'm trying Siren right now; so far it has sweetened up somewhat on my skin but still seems distressingly woody (Must be the white ginger since I doubt it's the jasmine, vanilla, or apricot), probably just as well given my issues with ginger.

With the TV season wrapping up quickly (Oh Life! Why did you have to pick the pace back up and end awesomely and therefore make me sad that you will not get renewed even though it is your own fault you wasted this season for the most part? Oh Sarah Connor Chronicles! How are you so awesome?) it is sort of accidentally nice that Fox has kept fucking with Bones' schedule and doing weird empty weeks, because now there is still a lot of it left. More even than Dollhouse with it's late start. Does anyone know how many episodes Castle has this season?


Ugh! I never should have tried BPAL with ginger in it! It is making me want to die as well as not smelling good. Time to go scrub myself clean and then I will reward myself by trying Bengal on at last, which in the bottle smells perfect. Then in a few hours Jeremy will come home and we will go enjoy the fact that Little Caesars has opened up right down the street (my favorite big pizza franchise and one that is generally disappearing) and Jeremy got paid today and we have paid all our bills. But first, to get rid of this terrible judgment error of scent.

So today I caught up on this season's TV.

In Brief:

Dear Bones,

You know I totally love you, but I really feel like you need to step it up a little this season. Maybe you just haven't gotten your flow back but it's been a while. Please institute plot line that does not involve Angela's exciting love life.

kthnx,

Me



Dear Sarah Connor Chronicles,

You continue to be super awesome and bring it. You are really making every other show look bad in comparison. Please do not make me regret saying I love all these biblical references by doing something terrible and pedantic.

Much Love,

Me


Dear Life,

You are a really awesome show and I appreciate you trying to do something unexpected in the romance department, but NO... just no. New boss is gross, okay. I like the way you are working with the rest of his character but I am not going to buy him/Dani. So please stop. Quite likely different casting would have fixed it but there would still be the creepy boss stalker factor. And you didn't cast it differently and it's aesthetically unpalatable as is. Also, I miss old boss. She was interesting and innovative.

Yours Truly,

Me

Ps. Why is episode 2 of this season's Life missing?

First there was TWO hours of Bones last Wednesday, the only show I've been anticipating really since the end of last year's season. The season finale was a little bit... ummm dissapointing but I still really really love this show.

( Bones 4x01 )


So last week (or maybe the week before?) I watched Season 1 of The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I liked it, although some of the logic/paradoxes of time and causality sort of needed to be hand waved. Basically Summer Glau makes a great robot trying to understand and interact with humans and that's what's really compelling to me, much as I may like Sarah being hardcore etc. So last night we watched the season 2 opener:

( The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2x01 )

( Bones 3x14 - The Wannabe in the Weeds )

2 Weeks Behind on BSG
3 Weeks Behind on Doctor Who

Which of course means I picked back up a Doctor Who fic I started in January, which I am suspecting has been jossed, but seem to want to write without catching up on Who/watching Torchwood and seeing if minor tweaks are needed and might make it canon compliant.

FOX was actually starting to get on my good side recently. They didn't cancel Bones when we expected them to. Then there was the announcement of the Dollhouse deal. I was feeling their reform. But now they have announced that they are moving Bones to Friday. FRIDAY! Seriously. They just lost all of the points they might have gained over the last few years.

I feel like I should post about the season premieres for Bones and The Office... but I don't have anything brilliant to say about them. Not because I didn't like them (although The Office is still proving problematic), I just feel incoherent/uninspired.

So that poll from yesterday wasn't exactly random.

The Bones question was partly trying to see how popular the show was on my flist (or how much recruiting I needed to do), but also a good segue here for me to talk about why I love Bones, and you should give it a shot... or a second try. When I heard about Bones, a procedural with Angel... I was not really at all interested. The first few times I caught bits of season 1, I had a hard time remembering that Booth was not Angel and was in fact a "normal" human being, and FBI agent. The first time I watched a whole episode, I wasn't that in to the crazy case of the week (cannibalism) but I did enjoy the beginnings of UST between Booth/Bones. More than that though, I enjoyed the scenes back at the lab with the secondary characters. They are all totally smart science nerds, but the show didn't stick to that. They are really interesting, human, adorable, and compelling. They were funny, but not in that self deprecating way that makes me not enjoy most comedy. I'll admit though, that this wasn't enough to get me hooked on the show. I might have not started watching it at all, if it weren't for sophia_helix who showed me the pirate episode, and the more I started catching episodes at her house, the more I wanted to see the next one. I think it helped that the show was having more interpersonal plotline on the surface, including nerd love that didn't follow any of the customs for sidekick romance plotlines. But whatever it was, I became totally hooked. I was going to try and quantify things like interesting and intelligent characters and the balance between humor and drama and the mystery of the week and the character arcs (which exist and work!), but then I realized that the sense of balance and cohesion that makes good tv, can't be explained. So I'm just saying, it grew on me and maybe if you let it... it will grow on you too. It has become the highlight of my TV week and the one thing I really would be upset if got canceled.


The Song of Ice and Fire question was more about pimping and less about asking. I know who reads the series, have for a long time. But I think that all of you should be. I was shocked to find in my poll that someone I generally find to have much the same taste as myself, apparently is the one person not to like these books, who has been exposed. They have everything, from the elements of high fantasy (dragons, prophesies, magic), to the grittiness and psychology of high literature. Martin makes you root for both sides of opposing forces at the same time. He makes you hate a character for his monstrous behavior and then explains the other side and you find yourself respecting and emphasizing with that same character. He gives you strong willed women, some in body and some not, some valiant and some villainous. He gives you a spectrum of religions, some with frightening power and some seemingly inept. He gives you romance and anti-romance and friendship and backstabbing and kin and twisted secrets and a whole world that feels as if it really is three dimensional and has a history longer than our own and not just invented backwards in the shallow space between the book's bindings. It is a world as real as our own, and just as complex and subtle and brazen and crude and sophisticated. This is the series of our time, possibly all time. It is epic like Tolkien but insightful like Dostoyevsky and puzzling like Garcia Marquez and bleeding like Morrison and probably I am overselling it, but I know books are harder to persuade than TV shows. So I will end by telling you how I spent the YEARS between the release of the second and the third book actively thinking about the characters and world the entire time... without fandom or anyone else to feed me back enthusiasm or motivation... I just couldn't get it out of my head.


The Supernatural question was a trick question. Supernatural's very existence offends me. I deleted a lot of people off my flist for talking about it too much a while back. Nothing in it appeals to me. I don't like scary things, I don't like female-less shows, I don't like slash terribly much, and people who try and convince me to watch based on Denny being on it... clearly didn't pay attention to my hating Denny and wanting him to die and get off my show. Occasionally they have guest stars I sort of want to see, but that is not enough to change my distaste for the whole thing. Now, my poll (and common knowledge) shows that people I like and respect seem to be really into this show, but I just can't get over how much it represents everything I hate about TV and fandom. I like a good looking guy as much as the next girl but really... it's got to stop. When I say I dislike slash I belie myself. MY VM OTP is after all... slash. But what I really dislike is the slasher mentality. Cut the girls out because girls are yucky and we hate ourselves and let's have boylovin' probably boylovin' in which one or both of the boys act like girls and maybe we will even dress them up like girls but vaginas are scary and yucky and I hate gross disgusting het. I know... it's not like I'm saying anything new, but the whole thing just brings up all the old issues.


BSG's inclusion wasn't about pimping or bitching. I knew I was going to watch the rest of season 3 last night, so I figured it would be a good way to tie in my reaction/opinions and tie others reactions to my memory of it. So without further preamble ( Reactions, speculation, and observations from Crossroads and about Season 4 )


The HBO poll was largely just a poll. I wanted to see who was watching the things I've been watching and I wanted recommendations for other HBO shows because, while they are too expensive to get any way other than netflix, they seem to make good tv... and concise. I'm thinking some time in the next few weeks I will be marathoning season 2 of Rome, and as soon as the boy finishes watching Veronica Mars I'll probably be watching Big Love again, and be caught up in time to not be able to see season 2 in real time since I don't have access to HBO. Rome is shiny bloody porn, and I am excited and kind of glad I saved most of the season till now. Big Love is interesting and kind of ridiculously sexy.


So I picked up the first issue of the Buffy comic last week and I enjoyed it, but I am almost tempted to wait and not read until the whole thing is done because it's seriously so little! I want MORE and feel dissatisfied by the limitedness of what fits in one issue. I feel like I only got the teaser that goes before the credits.


( So I will put the love triangle discussion under the cut since it will have spoilers for aired episodes of Ugly Betty and The Office )


So the spin off question... other than being a chance for me to be snide and give overly specific answers? Well it's been on everyone's mind.

I am the opposite of most of fandom, in that, if I could redesign the VM cast Logan would definitely not be in it any more. He's Spiko(fandom cliches of Spike and Draco) and he's taken that role in the show. He takes too much screen time and basically just wallows in emo. He was a good character in season 1 because he was antagonistic but someone Veronica had a connection to. In season 2 he was off with Weevil, again being ally and antagonist... now he's just lame boyfriend or not boyfriend. You can't please the fangirls... if he's domesticated he's a drag and if he's back to being an asshole you are vilifying their precious.

While I'd be perfectly happy to see Veronica Mars canceled and put out of it's misery like it deserves and probably will be, part of me does want some sort of redemption for something so fallen... and probably it wouldn't work out that way but a little part of me hopes.

I am somewhat jaded about the Addison spin-off. Grey's has too many characters and instead of using the spin off to lessen the burden they are just adding more people. Still, the cast for the show looks pretty good and I can easily go for more shiny crack. If it was me though... I'd move Sara Ramirez over and then she and Taye Diggs would eventually SING.

Angel, however, probably set the bar too high for any other spin-off to meet it. It took a beloved show and made something even better... keeping the trademark Joss style and at the same time having a completely different ideology than the original and a whole new flavor.