Further Assimilations

Monday night Starr was working on her laptop, so I wanted to put something on the TV that she didn't have to watch. I ended up putting on the 20th anniversary DVD of "The Five Doctors". Starr got sucked into it anyway, and at the end stated firmly that there was something about style and feel of the Who of the 80's that she rather appreciated.

I don't want to just sit and bash the new show - it's not my position at all. I am quite the fan of the Ninth Doctor, and the recently-aired (here) episode "Blink" is one of the franchise's finest. But I get what she's saying, and I've been trying to pin down what it is that I miss. Is it a certain innocence about the older show? The rampant charisma of Tom Baker? The shinier, more futuristic TARDIS interior of the period? Or should I chalk the whole feeling up to nostalgia on my part? I'm not sure.

For those who abstain from BitTorrenting, I greatly look forward to opinions on the end-of-season three-parter. After that, I look foward to series four next year. At least I'll be caught up this time!

There's a cold that's been going around. For the past three days, I've been ill. Tonight... I'm VERY ill.

This meme claims that the incarnation of the Doctor I'm most like is the Fourth. I can see that... goofy demeanor, odd choice of dress, encyclopedic knowledge of arcane subjects.

More interesting to me are the runners-up. The Third was the Bondian action-hero gadget-freak (yes on two, no on one), the Ninth was the charismatic but traumatized survivor, and the First was the cranky, eccentric, elderly genius on the run from his people. (Cranky and eccentric, perhaps.)

My poorest matches are the Tenth and Sixth, which I'm fine with. I haven't quite warmed to the Tenth yet - he seems a bit flighty and unfocused; while the Sixth, bluntly, was an asshole.

( See the actual results )

Guitar Hero II arrived in my house this week, thanks to the lovely raininva's observance of my birthday. Now, I haven't had a lot of free time on my hands, and even my gaming is scheduled by priority these days, but ya gotta take some time out of the day to hold a plastic guitar in your hands and rock out to Cheap Trick, The Pretenders, and David Bowie. (I think some of our guests approved more of the Motley Crue and Danzig tracks, though.)

The game's got a bit more realism than I'd like, though - Rain and I are developing blisters on our fret and strumming fingers.

The book - very little going on. I worked out some background changes to my universe which will allow for more sensible plotting and better conflict, but I'm still not real sure what the ending's going to be. Clearly, this isn't going to be done by the end of the month, but then I'm not that worried; I never expected it to. (The base universe is one I created round about 6th grade. It's weird making changes to something that's been mostly static in my head for 20-odd years.)

I have several episodes of Torchwood in my hands, but I haven't finished watching the 2006 Doctor Who season - in fact, as of last night, I'm behind the SciFi Channel's broadcast (it's sitting on the DVR). Since I'm reliably informed that the series opener of Torchwood spoils much of the end of the Doctor Who season, this means I'll have to wait a while longer to get my Captain Jack fix.

Apparently, Rising Star went extremely well this year. Kudos to Cathy and all how worked so hard to pull it off. I think many excellent decisions were made this year, and it bodes well for the future of the con.

I'm burning DVD data discs tonight in a desperate attempt to find clear space on my hard drives.

In the first episode of the 2005 Doctor Who series, Rose tries to find out something about this strange Doctor she's met. Clive the conspiracy theorist tells her that he has one constant companion - Death.

Clive has a point. Though the Doctor usually prevents bad situations from getting much much worse, there's no doubt that people drop like flies while he's around, and that's been the case throughout the 44-year history of the series. It's strongly implied that just before he met Rose, the Doctor was partially (if, perhaps, accidentally) responsible for the death of his entire race.

So, for me, the scene in Friday's episode where the Doctor begs the Chula nanogenes for one tiny miracle - one day where no one dies because he wasn't a little faster, a little smarter, or a little luckier - is poignant as hell. Imagine the guilt that a compassionate man would carry after 900 years of not quite getting 100%, wondering if maybe he could have made it all work a little better.

Then, see the look on Eccelston's face as this time he gets it right. For once in all his centuries, no one has died on his watch, and there are no horrors which are even partially his fault. Eccleston plays it beautifully, and maybe this is just a TV show, but it's moved me every time I've watched it.

On the other hand, my geek cred is eroding a bit. 5 episodes into the new season, I haven't managed to find time to watch even one of them. Oh well.

I suppose it's not very convincing to call in sick when one's already reported for work. Darn it. It's nice out, and has been for the last couple of days.

An offhand comment about fashion (and the broken air conditioner in the typesetting room) led to my co-workers discovering I own a Utilitkilt. Now everyone wants me to wear it to work sometime soon - including my supervisors. (This is a workplace where one person has actually come to work in her pyjamas... so there's not exactly a strict dress code.)

My jacket is currently sporting a button that reads "Paranoia, n. A healthy understanding of the way the universe works." This made the day of a clerk at FYI Music over Christmas... apparently it hadn't been a happy shopping morning. That same day, a customer in Red Robin went nuts over the "Team Banzai" emblem on the back of the jacket, and we spent about ten minutes swapping Buckaroo trivia.

Finally, I managed to watch "The Christmas Invasion" last night. That's one of the darkest Dr. Who episodes I've ever seen. Someone makes a very nasty decision at the end, and though my knee-jerk reaction was to condemn it, I can sort of see both sides. I have to say that the new direction for the show impresses me... I never before expected to call an evening with the Doctor "thought-provoking". I know I'll be looking forward to "Torchwood" when that comes on. (Also because it'll have Captain Jack Harkness in it.)

Grumpy me pokes his head out of his LJ cave and says, "write some stuff, it'll help you get over yourself".

I have a job interview tomorrow, and tonight I work a trial shift at a typesetting job. If either one of these jobs works out to a steady paycheck, I can stop sweating and resume planning for the future. I've been filing unemployment claims with the state for a month now, and haven't seen check one, so things are pretty tight.

I've missed every summer con I wanted to go to this year because of money issues. Bleh. This is, of course, part of the general fan experience - not news to almost anyone reading this journal - but it's still disappointing. I keep reading about cartoonists and gaming people who will be at DragonCon and grumping.

Moving my Doctor Who episodes over to DVD so I don't have to drag around the laptop for showings; it's a lengthy process, involving converting the episodes to DV streams, and then letting iDVD convert them back down to MPEG-2 files. Unfortunately I don't have software that will skip the middle step. I hope the quality stays okay, there's clear artifacting in the AVI files already. A friend pointed out that the first season never managed to get to an alien planet - only England, Utah, and a couple Earth-orbit space stations. I hope the second season's more ambitious.

We watched Constantine a couple nights ago. It's an okay flick if you don't think too hard about the religious aspects involved... which, for obvious reasons, is next to impossible to manage. It's not even that I disliked the movie, it's just that I kept thinking, "But, but, but..." afterwards. It was also a shame that the movie was unable to rise above killing off the three obvious redshirts.

One thing is now clear to me in WoW; soloing sucks, partying generally rocks. This has of course been obvious to most of the players of the game for ages, but I am sometimes slow. Clearly I must bite the bullet (WoW does have firearms) and find more folk to group with on a regular basis.

Booklist: finished Eragon (N), Wizard's Holiday (N), Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy (R), Just a Geek - Wil Wheaton (N), Catch Me If You Can - Frank Abagnale (R), First Lensman + Gray Lensman + Second Stage Lensman - E.E. "Doc" Smith (R), A Morbid Taste For Bones + The Hermit of Eyton Forest - Ellis Peters (R). I wish I could find my copy of Doc's Galactic Patrol - methinks that I'll need to start haunting used bookstores again, which is how I got the Lensman books in the first place. I have been putting off reading Chobits 6 because it's been long enough that I'll want to re-read the comic from the beginning, and I'll probably also want to be able to afford 7 & 8 soon thereafter. BTW, I'd recommend anything on this list. Eragon especially was interesting to me by being remarkably unoriginal, yet well-written enough that I look forward to the next volume.

Oh, good lord, avoid The Reality Dysfunction. Nothing at all happens for 300 pages; dozens of characters are introduced and then left by the wayside; and then we start the lovingly, orgasmically detailed torture scenes of animals and small children. Really. I darn near threw the book across the room, and I certainly won't be finishing it. My guess is that the author has serious issues to work out, but I don't see any need to let him do so through me at $7 a book for a six-book series.

I'll let everyone know how the job thing pans out!

Eric Burns, of Websnark.com:

"I'd like to go into depth on the Jedi philosophy, on the core of Hubris that led to the Fall of the Jedi Order, on the nature of denial and of ossification, and on the ways that Qui Gon Jinn represented, thematically, a break from all that in his methodology which led step by step to the next three movies and the redemption of the Jedi in the Expanded Universe. I would. And I'd like to show how David Willis has highlighted this succinctly. I even accept that if I did so, I'd never, ever get laid again. Somehow, this thesis would cling to me like lack of hygiene and even geek grrls would pause upon seeing me, say "well, no. Not him," and move on."

Instead, he just points us to this "Shortpacked!" comic. Which is freaking hilarious.

Oh, and I've stumbled upon a site with more remixes of the Doctor Who theme than any sane soul would ever need.

raininva and I watched Robot Jox this weekend - I hadn't seen it since the early nineties. I liked the mech designs better than I did when I first saw it, and Gary Graham's an old genre friend now (once considered for Captain Sisko, according to the IMDB). But the script is still ungood. My favorite bit is still the one where the bad guy uses a prohibited ranged weapon during a match, causing the death of hundreds of spectators, and the referees just shrug and say "do-over!"

Contrast this to Gunhed, which has a cooler mech and more interesting characters, but is confusingly edited and is willing to let the audience make up their own explanations for a bunch of plot points. There was enough left unanswered in that flick that I was easily able to steal the whole plot for a Shadowrun game without giving too much away to the players. Still, I prefer it.

I'm trying to make a mental list of live-action "giant robot" movies that are worth spending 90 minutes or so on. Iron Man #28 looks good, but I don't know if it will ever be dubbed or subbed. And though I love it for camp, I'm not sure I can bring myself to include the first Power Rangers Movie.

Speaking of such, I've procured the Cutey Honey live-action flick, which will go into the "to be watched" queue after the latest Orion Slave Girl episode of "Enterprise" and this week's "Doctor Who". The movie's looking very cheesy, which of course is just what I'd be looking for.

The other serious Whovian at my office wants me to bring in the Whoman DVD that I still owe rubinpdf money for. I will do so. He has been warned :)

Booklist: I re-read Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, and am trying to finish his Beyond This Horizon, but the latter's just not grabbing me. OTOH, the local library had a hardcover of Larry Niven's Ringworld's Children, which I'm enjoying much much more than The Ringworld Throne. It's feeling more like SF than the "fallen-civilization fantasy" that Niven admittedly loves, but I think is a bit mined out. I've got another nonfiction library book on the OSS to read after that.

Wow. This got long.

I got a forwarded email about ip addesses today. The subject line was "fwip". This is brought to you by the Easily Amused Association.

I saw the screener for the new Doctor Who this week, and really liked it. The episode was fun, and avoided Fox's mistake of trying to cram too much continuity down a new viewer's throat - though there were a few tips of the hat to we long-term fans. I was going to post some specific opinions behind a spoiler cut, but I can wait until after Technicon to do that. I imagine that TV torrent sites are getting more queries on "rose" right now than the last time "The Bachelor" got pre-empted. I'm looking forward to more!

I've been spending a lot of time lately reading the archives at http://www.randi.org/ - some of the anecdotes are pretty wild. I can't honestly say I'm likely to attain the level of skepticism displayed by Randi or the late Carl Sagan, but I did work out at an early age that there are a lot of charlatans out there waiting to take advantage of anyone they can. I'm a tongue-in-cheek adherent of Discordianism partially because it doesn't want my money and would be disappointed in me if I started doing everything it told me to :)

Part of the fun of being Tech Support here is getting to play legitimately with the Developer Preview of OS X 10.4. Shiny beta plaything!

According to Doctor Who quizzes posted by snidegrrl and rattrap, I am the "Patrick Troughton" incarnation of the Doctor, and I have a secret crush on his companion "Zoe Herriot."

Kind of amusing, since I've never seen an episode with Zoe (not counting the "Five Doctors" reunion), and little more of the Second Doctor. I think I saw half of "The War Games", and the "Three Doctors" and "Five Doctors" reunions he was in.

But yeah, Zoe did have good taste in clothes :)