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healingmirth
healingmirth: Delahoy from the Unusuals, unimpressed (unusuals - delahoy)
I was cautiously optimistic going into this. And then, ten minutes in I started drafting this entry. I can't remember the last time watching something made me this angry, and continuing to watch it made me continually angrier.

here be fairly extensive spoilers for The Bastard Executioner pilot )

So. If the pilot had ditched.... basically the first 75% of the plot and characterization, I might possibly have enjoyed it. The question is now whether I can forgive or ignore it to watch any more. Dammit. I really did like the last few scenes.
healingmirth: Jim and Pam from The Office (US) - Fire Drill (fire truck)
I nearly just edited this into the last entry, but it's my journal and I'll do what I want!

I unignored a thing, and now I never have to think about it again, I hope.

While I was rewarding myself for being a grown-up, by listening to music and also eating soup for belated lunch, I suddenly remembered that there'd been a Jim and Pam (The Office) vid to The Great Escape, which I clearly needed to rewatch.

And then I decided to watch the series finale. And then I realized I'd already seen it, but I watched it to the end anyway. And THEN, I watched the second-to-last episode, which I had *not* seen, and y'all, I just love Jim and Pam so much? A love which in no way explains why I just quit watching The Office after season 5. (Fall 2009 was not a great time for me, I suspect, but a look back at my journal has a lotta tv discussion. And also the tidbit that apparently all my friends here read Twilight? I definitely blocked that out...)

So, depending on how disappointing a turn my hockey narratives take tonight, I may go into a The Office watching spiral.
healingmirth: Abby from NCIS looking skeptical (abby)
A clip show? Really? Disappointing in concept. Disappointing in execution.


I've spent much of the last week shaking the internet and hoping for the perfect fic to fall out.

(In case you missed it, the ability to "favorite" tags on AO3 is pretty great - and gives me a reason to go to the home page instead of my dash, so that's good for them, too.)

Since said fic hasn't magically appeared, I started clearing out some stuff marked to read later - mostly Teen Wolf, mostly longfic - which just served to remind me that I get frustrated when I'm out of sync with a fandom.

For instance: I got halfway through a story, and then suddenly realized I was only halfway through, "But where else does this story have to go?" I ask the author in my head. Where it has to go, I come to find, is into a totally different story. The two halves are connected in plot but not in tone, but now I really wish they'd published it as two fics in a series. Not least because this browser's memory doesn't handle long pages now. I know that chaptered fic can be such a cliche, but I'd really appreciate some demarcating features right now.

But I digress. My point is, if I wanted to talk about this fic, nuts and bolts, with someone, that ship sailed, like, last year. Womp womp.
healingmirth: Ultimate Thor, laughing (thor)
Are any of y'all watching these "Athelstan's Journal" minis that the History channel is spitting out? The ones where Athelstan is keeping an actual, bound (paper? parchment?) journal that he's writing in, along with some lovely charcoal sketches of Ragnar and Lagertha.

I think this is all of them? Athelstan's Journal on YouTube. (No idea if its region-locked, and doesn't appear to be captioned, at least not on mobile.)

In one of the ones I cleared off the DVR tonight (family?), near the beginning he refers to "a consolation devoutly to be wished," because what's the point of riffing on history if you can't rip off some Shakespeare on the way, right?

I shouldn't complain, though, because I would probably prefer a full length season that was just Athelstan narrating over everything, Wonder Years style.


I can't remember whether I linked to An Historian Goes to the Movies when I found it (via [community profile] metanews possibly? or possibly googling for things for that yuletide snippet I wrote). So, now I've linked to it!
healingmirth: text: "that's not destiny, that's a crazy scientist with a snake" (snake)
The Librarians was pretty good! I'm disappointed but not surprised that Pizza Girl continues to Manic Pixie Dreamgirl it up, but at least here she's Manic Pixie Has Some Agency Girl.

Also, Noah Wyle is wearing a cravat and is now a really full-on fun version of the caricature that he was for the first minute of the original movie. I'm not sure I'm going to love the continuing series when he only shows up sometimes, but I'm willing to stick with it for now. Wild magic! People being good at things!
healingmirth: Brian from The Breakfast Club, looking cool (breakfast club)
The Librarian: various mythical objects as subtitles. Starring Noah Wyle, Jane Curtin, Bob Newhart, a series of hot ladies with a variety of competencies, and cardboard villains with plenty of henchmen.

It's a little a lot White Folks Save the World, and I am pretty sure their technical advisor is Wikipedia, and it's possible that the first movie, which had a fistfight between two ladies, was not in fact a Bechdel pass. I don't think any of the movies passed, actually. There are also a lot of "colorful" locals who help Our Hero on his quest with varying degrees of attempts at cultural accuracy. I spent most of the evening watching the movies. On the one hand, they're fairly terrible.

On the other hand, they're intentionally funny, and well-acted, and I *really* loved Romancing the Stone when I was in high school.

There's a TV show now? I have to come back to it tomorrow, but I'm really hoping it'll be fun and a minimum of fail. In the series, it seems like Christian Kane plays Eliot, only with art instead of cooking, and whatsername who played Pizza Girl is... there, as are a couple other people and John Larroquette.

ETA: wrong redhead. Whoops.
healingmirth: Chekov from ST:AOS: "Can do that" (can do)
This is a mess. It is a long, unwieldy post. (And yet, there's still a lot of scattered thought niggling at me from the cutting-room floor.) If I were really as serious as I would like to be about critique, this would be a series of posts, but I have got yuletide words to wrangle, and this has gone on long enough. I told myself this week that I couldn't start anything else (friending meme, december meme, watch the rest of the TV in my DVR queue) until I finished this stupid draft post.




So:




I hate the opening of Scorpion. Hate it. Haaaaaate it.

and I had to upload it myself to show you what I'm talking about. sorry, CBS )
Does the fact that I couldn't locate the intro online in any of the many, many videos on the Scorpion youtube page mean that someone with a minimal talent for marketing at actual CBS also thinks it's horrible? Signs point to yes.

It's not even the credits! It's just sitting there, killing time and narrating me into a bad mood, and it's been there every flippin' week since the show's premiere, and now it's never going to go away.

But I will say this: that it does a good job of setting the tone for what it might be like to spend an hour with Fictional Walter O'Brien, if that were the show they were really trying to make.



Read more... )



Look, there are a bunch of things about this show - the actual show, not just my fannish hopes for it - that I really like. I love a good procedural. (Okay, and most of the half-assed procedurals.) I love a team dynamic, I love academics and other narrowly-smart people being thrust into messy real world consequences. (I adored the early seasons of Numb3rs.) I like that there's a whole group of people who are Good at Things and Bad at Life (which seems to include their government handler Cabe, even though he at least nominally cares about integrsting with society). I even mostly like Paige, the one person who is Okay at Life and Good at People, but historically Not Great at Things due to focusing on aforementioned life. I have high hopes for the rest of the season!

But seriously, I really, really, really hate that intro. So much.
healingmirth: Chekov from ST:AOS: "Can do that" (can do)
I would be interested to know how much substance there is behind the feeling that a reconstructed piece of writing is never as good as the original one. I had half of what eventually turned into this post written a week or so ago and then a mobile browser hiccup ate it, and everything I wrote after that just looked wrong. Eh, whatever.


In the chunk of time surrounding my aforementioned peak crush on Andy Murray, I accomplished nothing of value. My cat was perpetually angry at me and my belongings were steadily collapsing into a heap, and as time passed, one exacerbated the other.

I have since addressed most of the clutter, but we will not speak of the state of the kitchen, nor of whether I have over- or under-watered one of my exceptionally hardy plants. I just know it's unhappy, so I'm leaving it on the porch until it makes up its mind and either lives or dies. I've got friends coming over tomorrow, so I'd better finish up the rest of the tidying.


But! Being stuck on a train for several hours a day with variable internet access was great for forcing me to catch up on the TV saved to various hard drives and eventually my iPod. I watched almost all of The Musketeers, but detoured away in the middle of the penultimate episode because I realized that series three of Sherlock was probably going to make me angry, and I was hopeful that The Musketeers would not. I was mostly right.

brief nattering about Sherlock, Skyfall and Hannibal, cut to save a few lines of scrolling )

So Sherlock. Definitely made me think, but not exactly my version of fun.

Whereas Musketeers was thoroughly entertaining, but )

I haven't yet ventured into the wilds of any part of Musketeers fandom on AO3, but if you have a favorite author (or you yourself wrote something that I missed in the months and months it took me to catch up!) I will gladly take recs.


I also watched all of season four of Teen Wolf earlier this week, and while I appreciate that for once Jeff Davis didn't do anything that made me want to throw something at the TV, I also just really don't care. Like if the final episode of the season had been the series finale, I would have been totally fine with it. I liked the relationships he created. I didn't care about the plot thread he abandoned. The villain(s) and conflicts were reasonably engaging. I just... don't really care what happens now. It sort of seems like everyone is okay.

I had planned on signing up for [livejournal.com profile] tw_holidays, but there isn't a single story I want to request, or write, much less 3-5.

I'm reading through some meta and episode recaps, hoping it may spark an idea, but it wouldn't be a bad thing for me to concentrate on Yuletide, and maybe finally chip away at my [community profile] fandom_stocking debt.


In looking for Teen Wolf reaction posts that I'd bookmarked, I realized that I have just Way Too Many fics bookmarked on my phone, which was a thing I swore I would stop doing when my last phone glitched and ate all my bookmarks.

I should sort those out, but I'm busy reading my way back through the David Mitchell tag on AO3. New series of Would I Lie to You! yay!


I'm not doing the Friday five because I never do the Friday five questions (and also, it is now Saturday) but it reminded me that I randomly had "The Old Gumbie Cat" pop into my head and stick earlier this week. I haven't listened to a Cats recording in I don't know how long, but it's a song I love, so I didn't mind its appearance.


And finally, here is a thing that happened: an ad? or a promotional video at any rate, about livejournal
healingmirth: Delahoy from the Unusuals, unimpressed (unusuals - delahoy)
If you'd asked me last week, yes or no, whether I knew The Three Musketeers, I would probably have said yes. I'm finally watching The Musketeers this week, and nope! Never mind the fact that it took me like five minutes to come up with Aramis's name, minutes filled with me repeating "Athos, Porthos, and..." in my head, over and over again. Like, not a single thing has hit me with an oh-yeah or uh-no moment, neither plot nor characterization.

I tried watching the first episode a couple weeks ago, and it just wasn't working for me, but now I'm really enjoying it, and will probably finish the series this weekend. Is the fandom going to make me angry? The most kudos'd complete fic is Athos/OFC...


I am way behind on tonight's SYTYCD, but I have just yelled OH, FOR FUCK'S SAKE, TYCE followed shortly by OH MY GOD SHUT UP, NIGEL.


ETA:

And again, OH MY GOD, SHUT UP, NIGEL.


("Hey Ricky you're so great. If you were older we could date." -Jesse Tyler Ferguson, everyone.)
healingmirth: Glitch from Tin Man: "o.O" (Glitch)
I have things that I should be doing, but the weather is just... really nice. Like, really, really nice. So I've been sitting on the porch with my cat, watching the birds, and pretending that I am not going to be in a total panic meltdown tomorrow.


Possibly relevant to some of y'all's interests (particularly anyone who braves the wilds of Tumblr, where some days it seems like 30 might as well be dead)

Pop Culture Happy Hour (podcast): Too Old for Youth Culture and Toys
First, is it possible to be too old for youth culture? We approach this from a couple of angles: can you be too old for the content itself? Can you be too old for the experience of swooning over cultural experiences the way you did when you were younger? And what is it, exactly, that makes people feel old and tell you how old they feel?


This is from last week and I haven't listened yet, but like I've mentioned many, many times, I'm a big fan of Monkey See, and I generally enjoy the things they have to say.


Following up on the previous entry's television that isn't terrible, have some television that... sort of is.
the first episodes of Tyrant and Dominion )