It's just an ordinary day - Recent Entries

Just to pay appropriate note to the various and sundry other things that have been going on in my life:

Jam Reports. There have not been Jam Reports for the last couple of Jams, and I apologize in advance, but there will probably not be. I just haven't been focused enough to get proper Jam Reports written. However, it is worth noting that there is much promise with GBS' "Chemical Worker's Song" with the current set of voices. cflute in particular has some very impressive harmonies coming together for that, and kendaer is feeling some potential for rumbling out the lead on this on days when mamishka isn't available.

On a related note, solarbird and I went to go visit stealthcello this past Friday night, which was made entirely of Win. She and her family have a lovely home full of lovely large Maine Coon cats as well as six two-week-old kittens, with whom we visited as well and ZOMG TINY KITTENS. Dara shared some of the music she's been working on, and Betsy answered with some of hers, and me, I was impressed by Betsy's shiny new black carbon-body guitar.

One giggleworthy moment of the evening: Dara hitting a chord on the mandolin and announcing that that sounded like "ass minor". Betsy's daughter lost it laughing, and Betsy herself pondered the question of what precisely "ass" sounds like. Dara's response, entirely inevitably: "Here, pull my finger!"

I will also not be doing review posts for the most recent BSG and Doctor, again because short on general levels of cope. I will however say that the most recent BSG was quite solid. We actually haven't watched the most recent Doctor yet, but will hopefully be getting that in soon.

Current book on the queue: desperance's Bridge of Dreams, which I have scarcely begun, but already I am impressed by the liquid rhythm of the prose.

And because I could, I went and got RAM upgrades for both my MacBook and Dara's. Now Winnowill and Kiliandra both are at 2 GB, though I have observed that I'm still taxing the CPU a bit if I try to do too many things at once. Less so than before, granted, but the problem hasn't entirely gone away.

Working on listening to s00j's Sirens, to be followed up by vixyish and tfabris's Thirteen. I have however also squeezed in Capercaillie's shiny brand new album Roses and Tears, as well as Nickel Creek's first album, since I've been meaning to listen to them for ages. This marks the first official time I have ever purchased an album calling itself country. However, listening to it, I find it definitely upholds the Alexander James Adams Principle of Celtic and Country Music, to wit: same music, different whiskey. ;)

Dara and I are planning our assault on Folklife this weekend and we are for once actually looking at doing three of the four days. We definitely want to hit the Celtic Band Scramble on Saturday, but there are things that interest us quite a bit on Sunday and Monday as well. I'm thinkin', a great big (not to be confused with Great Big) glorious burst of Folklife just before surgery should be a good way to get ready.

And, it has occurred to me that as I am about to be lying flat on my ass for two weeks, I can finally read Deathly Hallows.

And have another Movie Suckoff. Because there will be another Movie Suckoff, oh my yes.

Last but most definitely not least: tomorrow night, JONES. Meeting casirafics and mamishka for the midnight show at the Cinerama, and there will be much fangirling. What can I say. There are only a few people in the world that can really get me to fangirl, but Harrison Ford is one of them.

And, just because I haven't done this in ages, here's an exercise update as well. I am now on my way back to Hobbiton!

Miles since April 5th: 107.6
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2863.8
Miles out of Minas Tirith: 26.8
Miles to Hobbiton: 1598.2

ETA 10:42pm: Oh yes, I forgot to mention: my Ubuntu VM problem has been solved thanks to help from blargh. The issue seemed to be that VMWare was confused by my machine's having both a CD-ROM and DVD drive, and when I changed the VM settings to tell it not to auto-detect a drive, it started behaving. So now I have a functional Ubuntu VM to use as a test platform at work. Go me! And thanks, Traest. :)

Dude, I am severely behind on my Battlestar review posts! Part of this, I have to admit, is that to some degree BSG is just not engaging me as heavily this season; the unremitting grim of the show is no longer adequately offset by likable aspects of the characters. I'm not feeling the Roslin love this season (with the exception, I grant, of episode 4.06), Lee has become a lot less interesting to me now that he's gone off to join the Quorum of Twelve, and even my and solarbird's TV Girlfriend Starbuck has gotten just a touch too crazy for me to really like as much anymore. In fact, the only character I'm still rather liking is Sam.

All that said, though, I'm still definitely intrigued by the overall events going on. The last three episodes have given us some tasty WTFery, and the whole building Cylon civil war? Booya. BRING IT.

( 4.04: Escape Velocity... )

( 4.05: The Road Less Traveled... )

( 4.06: Faith )

And, that'll do me for quick and dirty review comments. We'll see if I can do a full post for next week's episode; now, I gotta go edit something!

And, super-quick before we watch tonight's episode, my post for last week's! Hoo boy, that was one of the most depressing episode endings we've had on the show.

( Spoilers on the brink of civil war... )

Another late review post, just because I've had to ration out what brain I have available across the week. But! I want to get this written up before we actually watch the next episode. ;)

Picoreview: Nothing terribly surprising in the Starbuck plot, some nice tear-jerky bits with Apollo, and oh my the situation on the Cylon side just got real, real interesting.

( Spoilers now setting out to join the Quorum of Twelve... )

Not sure what I think about the first episode out of the gate; it wasn't quite as spectacular as I might have hoped for, after this long of a wait. At least one thing in it was actively annoying in that psych-got-ya! fashion. On the other hand, there were also some things of active interest.

( The spoilers are THIS WAY! Seriously! They're over HERE! )

Last night spazzkat and I opted to watch The Mist instead of BSG. That was at least at the time the Wrong Decision, given that The Mist's ending absolutely blows.

However, it meant that we also got to watch BSG and the Doctor back to back tonight. Separate posts are forthcoming on both of these. However, this one is for the following Doctor-related PSAs:

1) The Sarah Jane Adventures will be airing starting next week on the Sci-Fi channel!

2) And, apparently the new Doctor season is airing in the States a lot sooner than I'd anticipated. During BSG, I noted an ad for the season premiere on April 18th. So if you don't want to go the Bittorrent route, turns out you don't have to wait too much longer after all.

Yay all around!

It is raining like a crazy raining thing in the Puget Sound area tonight. This is kind of appropriate weather, as I got another rejection on Lament of the Dove today--so this leaves me with one active query still in the air. And that means in turn that I need to get a couple more queries out this weekend. At minimum, I need to hit the next two agents on my list of agents I'm interested in; if I get really ambitious, I'll fling out a couple of paper queries as well. (But I'm not sure I'm going to get that ambitious.)

On a related note, though, I am told by mizkit that the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold contest is absolutely worth the time and money, so I will be preparing Lament to head in that direction over this weekend as well. I figure at minimum, I'm willing to put down the entry fee if it'll get me an interesting critique. More than that would, of course, be cake.

On the good side, though, I had lunch with casirafics today, and we writer-geeked, and fandom-geeked, and expressed our mutual pleasure over the resumption of Battlestar Galactica tonight and Doctor Who tomorrow. Tasty truffles were purchased from the Dilettante Cafe after. Mine were eaten on the way back to work. Yum. ;)

Meanwhile, I will be making a pilgrimage to Dusty Strings tomorrow to finally get a replacement D string for my bouzouki, and hopefully also, replacement tuning pegs for the guitar. And solarbird and I want to practice some on the Meg Davis song "Elf Glade" we've been playing in Jam, which should be fun.

And there will be BSG, and the Doctor, and spazzkat has The Mist in on the Netflix queue, and that should be fun to watch tomorrow night. There are also rumors of a musical outing on Sunday afternoon; more on this on Sunday.

Tonight, though, I'll be enjoying my reunion with my and Dara's TV girlfriend, Starbuck!

Miles since (holy crap, has it really been this long since I did an exercise update?) January 13th: 171.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2756.2
Miles out of the Morannon: 39.2
Miles to Minas Tirith: 80.8

First up: someone does a LOLCutter on elfquest, and lo, it is the Win.

Second: the 2008 Hugo nominations are out! I haven't actually read any of the contenders for Best Novel this year, though I am eying the Scalzi and the Stross, to be sure. And I must also admit that I looked at the blurb on Rollback in the store, and the concept sounded interesting. I may well indeed have to check out the reviews going around on these books.

However, I'd like to call your all's attention to the delightful list of contenders for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:

Battlestar Galactica "Razor" Written by Michael Taylor Directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá and Wayne Rose (Sci Fi Channel) (televised version, not DVD)

Doctor Who "Blink" Written by Stephen Moffat Directed by Hettie Macdonald (BBC)

Doctor Who "Human Nature" / "Family of Blood" Written by Paul Cornell Directed by Charles Palmer (BBC)

Star Trek New Voyages "World Enough and Time" Written by Michael Reaves & Marc Scott Zicree Directed by Marc Scott Zicree (Cawley Entertainment Co. and The Magic Time Co.)

Torchwood "Captain Jack Harkness" Written by Catherine Tregenna Directed by Ashley Way (BBC Wales)

I am particularly delighted by the Doctor Who squareoff, and am hopeful that paulcornell2 will score the win despite the excellent competition from Mr. Moffat--just because a) Mr. Cornell is awesome, and b) as I gushed before, David Tennant's performance in that two-parter was incredible.

However, I am genuinely unsure whether either of these will pull ahead of the competition!

And last but not least, Juno says no on Faerie Blood, but this was another favorable rejection, purely a "not to my taste" thing. I can deal with that. Now I'll just have to figure out where else I have left to send this one while I'm querying Lament of the Dove; DAW's most likely. We'll see.

I finally remembered, since I have a few moments, to check the official BSG site for when Season 4 premieres. And in nice large red letters, it says up there that Season 4 commences on April 4th!

That's two weeks from now, folks--and, as it happens, the exact same weekend that Doctor Who kicks back in as well. The Doctor will be IN on April 5th.

That weekend should, accordingly, rock.

As previously promised, here's my detailed reaction to Razor now that the thing's actually aired on the Sci-Fi channel! It held up well for solarbird and me on a second viewing, too.

( Flashback-flippy spoilers back here... )

solarbird and I went to the sneak preview of the 2-hour BSG movie Razor, as per my earlier post on the topic. And oh my yes, that was a lot of fun. ^_^

About the movie itself: I won't go into too much detail, since we are under two weeks away from the broadcast date (Saturday, 11/24, mark yer calendars and set your DVRs, troops). But I will say that it was awesome to see Battlestar on the big screen. We get a lot of backstory that isn't any real surprise to anyone who's been with the series since Season Two. We get several interesting questions raised about things to come in Season Four. We get one previously interesting bit of potential subtext turned into outright text, which simultaneously delighted me and disappointed me, and I shall comment more on that when the thing actually airs. We get a flashback clear back to the days of the First Cylon War and a certain Lieutenant "Husker" Adama, which was very cool. And best of all, there's some bits towards the end where the plotline suddenly goes quite old school, and that provoked a wave of delighted cheers from our audience.

Once the credits rolled we got a sneak preview of Season Four, which is quite promising, as well as an ad for the Razor DVD--which is going to be worth buying even for those of us who attended this sneak preview, because it's got extra footage in it. I'll definitely be buying this thing when it goes on sale in December.

Afterwards, there was a raffle of free swag. Neither Dara nor I won anything, but it was nevertheless amusing to see sweatshirts handed out for the new Xbox game Mass Effect, which is about to go on sale. Three Halo-3-branded Zunes were handed out, and the biggest ticket item was an Xbox 360.

But the cool part of the gifts being handed out was zomg surprise Apollo. :D Jamie Bamber himself was there, along with Stephanie Jacobsen, the actress who plays Kendra Shaw, a central character in the Razor plotline. Dara and I both did happy doubletakes at the sight of Mr. Bamber walking into the theater; even though he was wearing a suit and had his hair longer and darker than we typically see it on the show, he still looked very, very Apollo-ish from a distance. Didn't sound it quite so much once he started talking, but oh, his accent is delightful.

He talked about how the show was about to go dark due to the writer's strike, but also expressed his support and that of the cast for the WGA cause, which was cool to hear. And he introduced several important people in the audience, provoking a wave of applause, and also talked about how he too found it cool to see Battlestar on the big screen for the first time. But the best thing of all that he said was about how Razor was showing in the twelve biggest cities in the country... and Seattle. Because we are, and I quote, "the geek capital of the world"!

You heard it straight from Apollo himself, folks. SO SAY WE ALL!

Snurched from casirafics, I bring you battlestarevent.com. They're apparently doing a limited-release showing of the upcoming two-hour movie Razor in theaters.

That's right folks, big screen Battlestar.

solarbird, spazzkat, and I are so there.

A PSA for those of you who have been following Blood Ties: the next episode due to air is now available on iTunes as a free download. Here's hoping that the show comes back a little more solid than the last couple episodes I watched. Thanks to seimaisin and hederahelix for the heads up on that! And speaking of TV-related PSAs, here's an advance warning for the BSG fans on my Friends list: "Razor", the two-hour Pegasus flashback movie, will be airing on the Sci-Fi channel on 11/24. I'm actually way more interested in seeing that than the resumption of Blood Ties, but I'll take both.

On a related note, I have finished plowing through Season Three, Volume One of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Muahaha. We're getting into hardcore crazyland by now, enough that the small number of reasonably sane episodes in this volume are actually kind of boring; one suspects that the writers were all going "Ah, hell, we did this idea in season 1. Back to the Monster of the Week!" The volume ended with a semi-sane episode, though. I think it was trying to lull me into a false sense of security before I dive into Volume Two later this month. Bring it, Irwin! I'm ready for the Mummy and the Mermaid and the Fossil Men! ;)

Until I get more cheesy Voyage goodness, though, I've been trying to do productive this this weekend. Errands have been run. Checkbooks have been balanced. Laundry has been done. Kittens have been well and thoroughly played with. My guitar has been tuned up again, and practiced upon; to my delight, I found I was able to play along with Heather Alexander's "Tomorrow We Leave for Battle" fairly well, and the rhythm line for the non-solo bits of "Faerie Queen" was surprisingly easy, with only three, count 'em, three chords. (I still need to replace the B string, though, and I still need to restring the bouzouki.) And I am pleased to have found rachelcaine's Midnight Alley down at Third Place Books. Not going to read it quite yet since I'm still working on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is getting weirder the farther I get into it.

Tomorrow is my next medical appointment, which means I'll be late to work. We'll have to see how many other disruptions I get to have to my schedule this week; more on this in another post.

Miles since the 4th: 2.2
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2387.1
Miles out of Isengard: 594.1
Miles to Minas Tirith: 191.9

To steal an idea from technosage, I thought that in honor of International Blog Against Racism Week, I would take some time to squee about favorite characters of color in my various fandoms.

In Elfquest, Rayek and Ember. Rayek because I spent several years roleplaying him on Two Moons MUSH--I in fact still have a lot of the roleplay logs. (I play Rayek in those up through 1998 or so.) I loved Rayek a lot for starting off an arrogant jerk and maturing eventually into a humbler yet still highly motivated elf. As for Ember, I really liked her storylines trying to grow up in the shadow of her famous chieftain father, not to mention her brother packing more magical power than anyone in their tribe had ever seen. Some of the best RP I ever did on Two Moons, in fact, was as Rayek--in no small part due to eveshka and mizkit.

In Firefly, Zoe. Because, well, duh. I loved every deadpan line she had playing off of Mal, as well as her loving and vigorous relationship with her husband.

In Doctor Who, Martha. Out of respect for those of you who have not yet seen the full third season of New Who featuring Martha as Tenth Doctor's Companion, I will simply say that she is made entirely of awesome.

In Battlestar Galactica, Sharon Agathon, a.k.a. Athena, the cooler iteration of the Boomer series of characters.

And, of course, in classic Star Trek we have Uhura, the voice of the Enterprise. Because she is a musician, because I loved the old Trek novel Uhura's Song (and the feline sentient who took on the name Another StarFreedom in Uhura's honor), and because, let's face it, her hottest moment ever was whipping out that knife on evil!Sulu in "Mirror, Mirror". ;)

BSG 2.18, "Downloaded", is up for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form! But here's the kicker--it's up against not one, not two, but four episodes of Doctor Who: "Girl in the Fireplace", "School Reunion", and the thermonuclear pairing of "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday".

Damn. I mean, damn. That's hard.

Discuss!

Snurched from gamera_spinning, here is a quite interesting interview with Ron Moore regarding the BSG season finale and a few hints of what's to come. Chock full of spoilerage, of course, so don't peek if you haven't seen the finale yet!

( And don't peek at these thoughts, either... )

Daaaaaaaaaamn, that was something now, wasn't it? And we have to wait till 2008 for more?! AIGH!

( Spoilers in the court! )

Well, that was kind of random and full of characters who just seemed to me to be shadows of their former selves, and arguing with one another for the sake of arguing. And yet, it raised several intriguing questions.

( Spoilers waiting to be called before the court... )

I knew he was coming courtesy of seeing it posted on whedonesque, but it was still kind of weird and cool to see the dude who'd played Badger on Firefly guest-starring in tonight's Battlestar. Complete with the same accent! And this was mostly a filler episode, but with some definite sniffle-inducing moments....

( Spoilers filched when you weren't looking... )

........

Holy crap. Well now, that was interesting, now wasn't it?

( Spoilers underneath the clouds... )