Bits of randomness for a Thursday
1. Happy Pi Day! I myself plan to celebrate by having a homemade beef and bacon pie, followed by considerably less homemade cherry pie. This, of course, requires that I purchase bacon. Oh, the pain. It's a good sort of holiday to celebrate.
2. Over at Tor.com, the Georgette Heyer reread continues with Penhallow. Wow. I remembered this book as deeply, deeply unpleasant, but I hadn't remembered just how unpleasant or how many times characters threw things at each other or tossed people down the stairs. The comments recommend reading Cold Comfort Farm as an antidote. I agree.
3. My mother wants you to watch this. (In French, but you don't need to speak French to follow it.)
3. So I finally got around to catching up with Once Upon A Time, and
This show is so frustrating, because it tends to hover right on the edge of greatness, or at least good, without actually getting there, and tends to treat its characters so, so, unequally.
This is especially true when it comes to the bad guys, which this season have been Captain Hook (steamy!), Rumplestiltskin, Cora and Regina. Regina briefly was reforming, which was kinda interesting if a total waste of Lara Parilla's talent for playing sheer happy evil, and has now gone back to being Team Evil again.
What's frustrating is this: Captain Hook is evil and out for vengeance since the love of his life was killed in front of him. Rumplestiltskin is evil and out for vengeance since his complete misinterpretation of a prophecy led him to injure himself to get out of battle which in turn led to his wife leaving him, everyone assuming he was a coward, multiple acts of humiliation, and the chance to go all Dark One which made him even More Evil. The show has been suggesting that Rumplestiltskin's Evil Dagger is intensifying his Evil Nature, and most of his worst deeds have been post Evil Dagger, making this less his fault.
And then we have Regina, who has killed her own father and multiple other people AND terrorized a country AND then followed this up by throwing almost the entire land under a curse and dragging multiple people to Maine, which does not deserve this sort of thing, all to get vengeance on Snow White who...just happened to mention to Cora, Regina's mother, that a certain stable boy happened to hanging around. It would be bad enough if Regina was going after Cora for this -- Cora did, after all, actually kill the Stable Boy -- but, no: she's going after Snow White and anyone even remotely connected with her.
And then we have Cora, who apparently decided to go Team Evil because -- wait for it -- someone tripped her up.
No, really.
"It was so HUMILIATING!" Well, yes, yes it was, and yes, yes it's worth venting about, and yes, yes, a practical joke or two in response might be appropriate. And that's about it. Cora, though, followed this up by having an affair with Rumple, removing her own heart, poisoning Snow's mother, killing Regina's lover, removing lots of other hearts, and so on.
So, to sum up, we have two bad guys -- both men -- given more or less adequate motivations for going evil, and we have two bad guys -- both women -- given completely inadequate motivations for going evil which in turn make them look like overreacting drama queens with no sense of appropriate response. It's really not helping that the show is attempting to tell us that Rumple's motivation for putting everyone under a Dark Curse is to get his son back (ok, overkill, but still, kinda positive motivation?) while Regina's motivation is to make everyone really unhappy.
While I'm venting, given that the show already has three Very Evil characters, even if two of them were sorta on the path towards Good at the beginning of the season, was it too much to ask that Captain Hook be kept as more of a loveable rogue type instead of outright evil, especially given that the premise of the show is to give a "new twist" on old stories? Just for variety.
I have many other issues with the show, but I can't seem to get them into words. Grr. Ok. Pie!
2. Over at Tor.com, the Georgette Heyer reread continues with Penhallow. Wow. I remembered this book as deeply, deeply unpleasant, but I hadn't remembered just how unpleasant or how many times characters threw things at each other or tossed people down the stairs. The comments recommend reading Cold Comfort Farm as an antidote. I agree.
3. My mother wants you to watch this. (In French, but you don't need to speak French to follow it.)
3. So I finally got around to catching up with Once Upon A Time, and
This show is so frustrating, because it tends to hover right on the edge of greatness, or at least good, without actually getting there, and tends to treat its characters so, so, unequally.
This is especially true when it comes to the bad guys, which this season have been Captain Hook (steamy!), Rumplestiltskin, Cora and Regina. Regina briefly was reforming, which was kinda interesting if a total waste of Lara Parilla's talent for playing sheer happy evil, and has now gone back to being Team Evil again.
What's frustrating is this: Captain Hook is evil and out for vengeance since the love of his life was killed in front of him. Rumplestiltskin is evil and out for vengeance since his complete misinterpretation of a prophecy led him to injure himself to get out of battle which in turn led to his wife leaving him, everyone assuming he was a coward, multiple acts of humiliation, and the chance to go all Dark One which made him even More Evil. The show has been suggesting that Rumplestiltskin's Evil Dagger is intensifying his Evil Nature, and most of his worst deeds have been post Evil Dagger, making this less his fault.
And then we have Regina, who has killed her own father and multiple other people AND terrorized a country AND then followed this up by throwing almost the entire land under a curse and dragging multiple people to Maine, which does not deserve this sort of thing, all to get vengeance on Snow White who...just happened to mention to Cora, Regina's mother, that a certain stable boy happened to hanging around. It would be bad enough if Regina was going after Cora for this -- Cora did, after all, actually kill the Stable Boy -- but, no: she's going after Snow White and anyone even remotely connected with her.
And then we have Cora, who apparently decided to go Team Evil because -- wait for it -- someone tripped her up.
No, really.
"It was so HUMILIATING!" Well, yes, yes it was, and yes, yes it's worth venting about, and yes, yes, a practical joke or two in response might be appropriate. And that's about it. Cora, though, followed this up by having an affair with Rumple, removing her own heart, poisoning Snow's mother, killing Regina's lover, removing lots of other hearts, and so on.
So, to sum up, we have two bad guys -- both men -- given more or less adequate motivations for going evil, and we have two bad guys -- both women -- given completely inadequate motivations for going evil which in turn make them look like overreacting drama queens with no sense of appropriate response. It's really not helping that the show is attempting to tell us that Rumple's motivation for putting everyone under a Dark Curse is to get his son back (ok, overkill, but still, kinda positive motivation?) while Regina's motivation is to make everyone really unhappy.
While I'm venting, given that the show already has three Very Evil characters, even if two of them were sorta on the path towards Good at the beginning of the season, was it too much to ask that Captain Hook be kept as more of a loveable rogue type instead of outright evil, especially given that the premise of the show is to give a "new twist" on old stories? Just for variety.
I have many other issues with the show, but I can't seem to get them into words. Grr. Ok. Pie!