recent media (x-posted from Dreamwidth)
Obligatory TMI intro: I came home Friday (after a frankly lousy day) to find that my neighbors had whacked down a large chunk of their grapefruit tree. I love trees, and I know trees need to be pruned to thrive, but this was a blow because I loved looking out into a jungle of grapefruit leaves -- not to mention the squirrels, scrub jays, and other visitors to the tree's branches. The cats have adjusted to the loss of scenery better than I have. I put up a partial curtain because now my living room view is directly into someone else's living room. I could deal with that in NYC, but. This ain't NYC.
To get over my bad mood, I finished reading Martha Wells' Stargate Atlantis novel, Reliquary (publisher's description). The pacing was good, the plot was interesting with some nicely creepy touches, and I *loved* her Sheppard. The book was chock full of Sheppard+McKay interaction, including McKay having to take care of gravely ill Sheppard at one point (mmmm, yes please!), and struck the right note of snark and sincerity. Plus, having ancient technology sing to Sheppard while he's under the influence of wrong technology was *so* cool, what a brilliant idea. I've been missing Atlantis (already!) and this book took me to a happy Atlantis place.
The TMI is neverending: Yesterday was spent shortening all the plastic mini-blinds so I can actually raise and lower them, because who knows if the grapefruit tree pruning was an isolated event. I did not grow up with mini-blinds, and never had to deal with them until my last place of residence, where they were the metal kind. I never knew mini-blinds could be shortened until my mom made a passing remark over the phone recently. It wasn't hard! Tedious, yes. But so worth it.
Then I collapsed and rewatched a bunch of Merlin out of order, which was fun. I've only watched 2 1/2 commentaries so far, but I'm loving them. They've noticed the flags are always blowing in the same direction, too! :) And Katie McGrath teasing Bradley James and Colin Morgan about the chemistry between Arthur and Merlin, urging Arthur to tell Merlin he loves him... OMG. And everyone asking Colin why everything is always Merlin's fault. *So* much fun. Now I'm getting eager for season 2 Merlin.
The obligatory mention of Dreamwidth: Several on my LJ friendslist have announced their intentions, policies, practices, etc. Cool. I'm being a Pisces and not deciding anything yet. For one thing, I want to wait until Dreamwidth's Open Beta (April 30th!) to see how some things evolve. I am shifting to Dreamwidth as my "native" posting place, but I'm crossposting to LJ (including this post, which I will manually cross-post to preserve the cut tags) for the foreseeable future. I'll take comments anywhere, because I have comments emailed to me and it doesn't matter to me where they go. (Reading my friendslist & reading circle: yes, I agree, trying to track all comments to someone else's post across journals is not fun. But I receive few comments and almost no comment-discussion, so I don't think this will be much of an issue for my journal(s).)
Then, strangely, it became about : Months and months ago, I had an idea for a multimedia squee project about my pretty Koreans that I'd post to insanejournal, my place for squee. I only got as far as uploading a few Junsu snippets to imeem (and I forgot I even got that far). Today I was in imeem saving my blog posts there (notes about my vids) since imeem may not be long for this world, and found those snippet MP3s -- and not only had people found them and listened to them, but one was rated, and to the snippet from Junsu's "Rainy Night" someone had added John Legend as its composer, with a photo of John Legend. (John Legend is not the composer -- Junsu is! Unless Junsu, Avex, and SME are completely lying about this. O.o) Just goes to show. Something. Anyway, I deleted those snippets.
I replaced them with a DBSK MP3 sampler pack -- 6 Korean songs and 6 Japanese songs, a small selection of some of my favorites. They are a pop group, the songs are pop, fair warning, okay? Music, like TV shows and movies, is subjective. YMMV. If you hate them, I don't need to know that.
dbsksampler
(direct link for imeemers: http://www.imeem.com/sakana17/playlist/uLDCRRxo/dbsksampler-music-playlist/)
insanejournal, my place for squee?
For now, mostly, yeah. I did try to integrate my LJ and insanejournal into Dreamwidth, but fell prey to as-yet-unfixed Importer Bug #3, so I lost over half of my insanejournal entries and comments; many insanejournal comments have become entertaining non-sequiturs on old LJ entries. :) With this chaos, I have no decisions in place re: insanejournal, where I have a paid account through next year.
Lastly: Doctor Whoin' it old skool. For unknown reasons I've been wanting to watch "The Arc in Space" all week -- and found it on iTunes! They have a selection of "Doctor Who Classics" buried in there, overpriced but for someone wanting instant gratification, not so much so that I thought better of getting it (and "The Invisible Enemy"). The most annoying thing *as ever with iTunes* is its cruddy metadata. The different parts of a classic are called "episode 1" etc. So if you have more than one, the "episode 1"s interfile, followed by the "episode 2"s, and there is no episode title to distinguish them -- they are all called "Doctor Who: The Classic Series." There are descriptions and years, so I was able to sort them by year to group the episodes together, but honestly. This is so stupid. Standard disclaimers here: when I can, I will legally purchase stuff to encourage media companies to share more of their media. I'm sure the torrents are better (they are certainly cheaper) but I've never gotten around to installing a torrentware.
To get over my bad mood, I finished reading Martha Wells' Stargate Atlantis novel, Reliquary (publisher's description). The pacing was good, the plot was interesting with some nicely creepy touches, and I *loved* her Sheppard. The book was chock full of Sheppard+McKay interaction, including McKay having to take care of gravely ill Sheppard at one point (mmmm, yes please!), and struck the right note of snark and sincerity. Plus, having ancient technology sing to Sheppard while he's under the influence of wrong technology was *so* cool, what a brilliant idea. I've been missing Atlantis (already!) and this book took me to a happy Atlantis place.
The TMI is neverending: Yesterday was spent shortening all the plastic mini-blinds so I can actually raise and lower them, because who knows if the grapefruit tree pruning was an isolated event. I did not grow up with mini-blinds, and never had to deal with them until my last place of residence, where they were the metal kind. I never knew mini-blinds could be shortened until my mom made a passing remark over the phone recently. It wasn't hard! Tedious, yes. But so worth it.
Then I collapsed and rewatched a bunch of Merlin out of order, which was fun. I've only watched 2 1/2 commentaries so far, but I'm loving them. They've noticed the flags are always blowing in the same direction, too! :) And Katie McGrath teasing Bradley James and Colin Morgan about the chemistry between Arthur and Merlin, urging Arthur to tell Merlin he loves him... OMG. And everyone asking Colin why everything is always Merlin's fault. *So* much fun. Now I'm getting eager for season 2 Merlin.
The obligatory mention of Dreamwidth: Several on my LJ friendslist have announced their intentions, policies, practices, etc. Cool. I'm being a Pisces and not deciding anything yet. For one thing, I want to wait until Dreamwidth's Open Beta (April 30th!) to see how some things evolve. I am shifting to Dreamwidth as my "native" posting place, but I'm crossposting to LJ (including this post, which I will manually cross-post to preserve the cut tags) for the foreseeable future. I'll take comments anywhere, because I have comments emailed to me and it doesn't matter to me where they go. (Reading my friendslist & reading circle: yes, I agree, trying to track all comments to someone else's post across journals is not fun. But I receive few comments and almost no comment-discussion, so I don't think this will be much of an issue for my journal(s).)
Then, strangely, it became about : Months and months ago, I had an idea for a multimedia squee project about my pretty Koreans that I'd post to insanejournal, my place for squee. I only got as far as uploading a few Junsu snippets to imeem (and I forgot I even got that far). Today I was in imeem saving my blog posts there (notes about my vids) since imeem may not be long for this world, and found those snippet MP3s -- and not only had people found them and listened to them, but one was rated, and to the snippet from Junsu's "Rainy Night" someone had added John Legend as its composer, with a photo of John Legend. (John Legend is not the composer -- Junsu is! Unless Junsu, Avex, and SME are completely lying about this. O.o) Just goes to show. Something. Anyway, I deleted those snippets.
I replaced them with a DBSK MP3 sampler pack -- 6 Korean songs and 6 Japanese songs, a small selection of some of my favorites. They are a pop group, the songs are pop, fair warning, okay? Music, like TV shows and movies, is subjective. YMMV. If you hate them, I don't need to know that.
dbsksampler
(direct link for imeemers: http://www.imeem.com/sakana17/playlist/uLDCRRxo/dbsksampler-music-playlist/)
insanejournal, my place for squee?
For now, mostly, yeah. I did try to integrate my LJ and insanejournal into Dreamwidth, but fell prey to as-yet-unfixed Importer Bug #3, so I lost over half of my insanejournal entries and comments; many insanejournal comments have become entertaining non-sequiturs on old LJ entries. :) With this chaos, I have no decisions in place re: insanejournal, where I have a paid account through next year.
Lastly: Doctor Whoin' it old skool. For unknown reasons I've been wanting to watch "The Arc in Space" all week -- and found it on iTunes! They have a selection of "Doctor Who Classics" buried in there, overpriced but for someone wanting instant gratification, not so much so that I thought better of getting it (and "The Invisible Enemy"). The most annoying thing *as ever with iTunes* is its cruddy metadata. The different parts of a classic are called "episode 1" etc. So if you have more than one, the "episode 1"s interfile, followed by the "episode 2"s, and there is no episode title to distinguish them -- they are all called "Doctor Who: The Classic Series." There are descriptions and years, so I was able to sort them by year to group the episodes together, but honestly. This is so stupid. Standard disclaimers here: when I can, I will legally purchase stuff to encourage media companies to share more of their media. I'm sure the torrents are better (they are certainly cheaper) but I've never gotten around to installing a torrentware.