Happy new year
1) Other than wrapping "20/20", I uploaded the rest of my Prince of Tennis fic to AO3, reorganizing them somewhat in the process. The first of the lot is fully 10 years old. Good grief. I was 23 writing stories about what it might feel like to be 33. Now I am nearly 33, but it's less help than you might think since I've had a very different life from what I envisaged for the characters, who meanwhile in the ever ongoing manga are probably still about 15 (behaving in most respects like 18-20, but still).
2) Saw Catching Fire, American Hustle, and The Desolation of Smaug when they respectively came out, but little else in the way of new movies over the holidays. (Links are to Tumblr reviews.) Watched Steve McQueen's Hunger and a bunch of Netflix randomosity while catsitting for my sister.
3) Caught up on Hannibal-the-TV-series; will probably be done with the first season by tonight. It still operates with a weird believability gap, for me -- too many OTT serial killers for realism (or Baltimore), too much psychiatry and forensic work for outright phantamasgoria -- but if I give Bret Easton Ellis a pass as horror-fantasy this certainly deserves the same. I suspect I would be more comfortable if the series were supernatural, like if the evil deer were a shikigami, Sakurazukamori-style, rather than a metaphor/Victorian brain fever. Then I would know where I was at. XD;;
...CLAMP, eh. In retrospect, few people have written as fine a sociopathic serial killer story as Tokyo Babylon, if you choose to take that perspective on it. Young ladies and ultra-violence etc.
4) Sororial unit did a wizard thing with Chrome add-ons and Apple TV so we could hack into the iPlayer, and have accordingly watched S3E1 of Sherlock. Enjoyed it with the usual quibbles, more than I expected to after all this weary time (what Diane Duane calls the Medium Hiatus) -- it undercut the mainstream whodunnit speculation and worked to deliver the character growth only Tumblr obsessives demanded. But then I suppose Reichenbach/Hearse are really a Gatiss diptych; and Gatiss is the one who writes this adaptation the way I would. Which is also to say, as mystery plots go this Underground bomb nonsense is thin gruel. XD;
The casting is skating weirdly toward RPF, though it works in all instances -- a better Mary Morstan than I would have dared hoped for, so good in practice you don't realize she's very lightly sketched in-text.
5) Watched the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, which makes me only drastically behind rather than unutterably behind. Enjoyed but thought it worked better as setup for upcoming plot than as fan-service candyfloss, which is what multi-Doctor stories are supposed to be IMO. Furthermore it was awkwardly obvious that this was envisaged with Nine as part of the story (imagine how much better Billie's role would have worked). Must confess I do not umm actually understand how *spoiler* is supposed to differ from the status quo delineated in Ten's last couple of seasons, but agree that this is the right time in the arc of NuWho-as-a-whole to do *spoiler* regardless of what the nonsense explanation is. Now watch Moffat not actually delve into the obvious plot in S8 just to spite me. I maaaay cover off S7 if I find the time.
2) Saw Catching Fire, American Hustle, and The Desolation of Smaug when they respectively came out, but little else in the way of new movies over the holidays. (Links are to Tumblr reviews.) Watched Steve McQueen's Hunger and a bunch of Netflix randomosity while catsitting for my sister.
3) Caught up on Hannibal-the-TV-series; will probably be done with the first season by tonight. It still operates with a weird believability gap, for me -- too many OTT serial killers for realism (or Baltimore), too much psychiatry and forensic work for outright phantamasgoria -- but if I give Bret Easton Ellis a pass as horror-fantasy this certainly deserves the same. I suspect I would be more comfortable if the series were supernatural, like if the evil deer were a shikigami, Sakurazukamori-style, rather than a metaphor/Victorian brain fever. Then I would know where I was at. XD;;
...CLAMP, eh. In retrospect, few people have written as fine a sociopathic serial killer story as Tokyo Babylon, if you choose to take that perspective on it. Young ladies and ultra-violence etc.
4) Sororial unit did a wizard thing with Chrome add-ons and Apple TV so we could hack into the iPlayer, and have accordingly watched S3E1 of Sherlock. Enjoyed it with the usual quibbles, more than I expected to after all this weary time (what Diane Duane calls the Medium Hiatus) -- it undercut the mainstream whodunnit speculation and worked to deliver the character growth only Tumblr obsessives demanded. But then I suppose Reichenbach/Hearse are really a Gatiss diptych; and Gatiss is the one who writes this adaptation the way I would. Which is also to say, as mystery plots go this Underground bomb nonsense is thin gruel. XD;
The casting is skating weirdly toward RPF, though it works in all instances -- a better Mary Morstan than I would have dared hoped for, so good in practice you don't realize she's very lightly sketched in-text.
5) Watched the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, which makes me only drastically behind rather than unutterably behind. Enjoyed but thought it worked better as setup for upcoming plot than as fan-service candyfloss, which is what multi-Doctor stories are supposed to be IMO. Furthermore it was awkwardly obvious that this was envisaged with Nine as part of the story (imagine how much better Billie's role would have worked). Must confess I do not umm actually understand how *spoiler* is supposed to differ from the status quo delineated in Ten's last couple of seasons, but agree that this is the right time in the arc of NuWho-as-a-whole to do *spoiler* regardless of what the nonsense explanation is. Now watch Moffat not actually delve into the obvious plot in S8 just to spite me. I maaaay cover off S7 if I find the time.