Something new every day
I did not know that Mervyn Peake was an artist as well as a writer. Or, well, I knew he'd done illustrations for the Ghormenghast trilogy, but apparently he was a pretty well-known artist and illustrator in his day.
http://www.mervynpeake.org/artist.html
Had my interview with the recruiter for the new position Thursday, and my interview with the hiring director Friday. I think they both went well, but they won't make the decision till after Thanksgiving. The hiring director will be retiring in January, and it's very likely that her position will not be filled, and I (if I get the job) and the other person who currently reports to her will end up reporting to my current director or his boss. I'd be fine with that; I like my current director. But no point in counting chickens.
We saw what I think was a Cooper's Hawk this morning while walking Bo at the park - it was sitting in an olive tree only twenty or thirty feet from us, and let us get quite close before decamping to a taller tree. Very nifty!
Since the weather's been nice I've been trying to get as much stuff done in the yard as possible before it gets cold. If it ever does get cold. It is freaking November, and we are getting our fourth(?) crop of figs. And they are actually edible. Normally the last crop is stunted and pretty tasteless, if it ripens at all, but these are pretty good. I dug up most of the aloe vera in the front yard, since it was being buried by Bermuda grass. I'm going to pot a couple of them to keep, but now I need to get rid of a bunch of aloe vera. Anybody want some?
Let's see...Mom's had a cold, and lost her voice, but hopefully she'll be recovered by Thanksgiving. I'm taking the whole week off, and knock wood I'll get some writing done.
We finally caught up to the current episodes of Fringe. I am not liking this season quite as much as the previous ones, mainly because I get the feeling that it was sort of... tacked on? It feels like the last season of Babylon 5, in a way, like "Shit, we thought we were being cancelled, so we wrapped everything up, and now we're renewed and what the hell do we do now?" The Observers were these cool, alien figures with a mysterious agenda, and now they're just Any Old Evil Invading Army. It's... banal. And it doesn't make a lot of sense with what went before. September was originally observing Walternate curing Peter because it was important, apparently because Peter was destined to survive and have a child with Olivia. (Which means that at some point, the wall between universes had to be breached, right?) Him having the child with Fauxlivia instead changed history in such a way that the Observers were willing to re-write the whole timeline to avoid it.
So why are they conquering the past? And why are they willing to kill the kid who was so desperately important to them a few seasons ago? There's no motive for their actions, and this late in the concluding half-season of the show, it doesn't look like we're going to get one. Frustrating, though I guess it's par for the course for an Abrams show. (Though I must say Fringe has done a hell of a lot better than Lost in keeping its mythos straight.)
This is not to say I hate the season; far from it. I just don't like it quite as much as the earlier ones. I do like the recurring themes of family and the fucked-upness thereof over generations and over iterations of different timelines. I roll my eyes at yet another show which feels compelled to give their main couple a Miracle Baby to show how special and destined they are, but hasn't a clue what to do with her once they have her, and just use her to milk angst from her parents. SORAS and a tragic death seems to be overdoing it a tad, but what the hell. (I suspect one reason that Olivia has been so passive this season is that Etta took over a lot of her Action Girl plot elements. Possibly now that she's dead, Olivia will get them back.)
All in all, I really, really like this show. I like the (mostly) intriguing worldbuilding. I like the cast of characters, in all their different incarnations. I've seen a lot of bitter Olivia fans complaining that it's become the Peter show, and they miss when she was the main character... but I don't think she ever was THE main character. Despite some creebs about this season, overall, I think the writers have done a pretty good job of balancing Peter, Walter and Olivia as a trio of main characters. Given all that's happened this season, I wonder if they have the balls to have this show end on a note of Greek tragedy, as Peter fails to be a better man than his father and ends up threatening to destroy worlds for the sake of his dead child, just as Walter did. And if Walter and/or Olivia have to take him down.
Probably not. We may be heading for a reset. But Fringe is one show where I wouldn't feel like a reset is cheating, because it's one of the major premises of the show that resets are possible, and indeed, have already happened multiple times. And the whole point of the show is that resets don't solve anything - they just hand you a different set of problems.
Rants Talk to me
http://www.mervynpeake.org/artist.html
Had my interview with the recruiter for the new position Thursday, and my interview with the hiring director Friday. I think they both went well, but they won't make the decision till after Thanksgiving. The hiring director will be retiring in January, and it's very likely that her position will not be filled, and I (if I get the job) and the other person who currently reports to her will end up reporting to my current director or his boss. I'd be fine with that; I like my current director. But no point in counting chickens.
We saw what I think was a Cooper's Hawk this morning while walking Bo at the park - it was sitting in an olive tree only twenty or thirty feet from us, and let us get quite close before decamping to a taller tree. Very nifty!
Since the weather's been nice I've been trying to get as much stuff done in the yard as possible before it gets cold. If it ever does get cold. It is freaking November, and we are getting our fourth(?) crop of figs. And they are actually edible. Normally the last crop is stunted and pretty tasteless, if it ripens at all, but these are pretty good. I dug up most of the aloe vera in the front yard, since it was being buried by Bermuda grass. I'm going to pot a couple of them to keep, but now I need to get rid of a bunch of aloe vera. Anybody want some?
Let's see...Mom's had a cold, and lost her voice, but hopefully she'll be recovered by Thanksgiving. I'm taking the whole week off, and knock wood I'll get some writing done.
We finally caught up to the current episodes of Fringe. I am not liking this season quite as much as the previous ones, mainly because I get the feeling that it was sort of... tacked on? It feels like the last season of Babylon 5, in a way, like "Shit, we thought we were being cancelled, so we wrapped everything up, and now we're renewed and what the hell do we do now?" The Observers were these cool, alien figures with a mysterious agenda, and now they're just Any Old Evil Invading Army. It's... banal. And it doesn't make a lot of sense with what went before. September was originally observing Walternate curing Peter because it was important, apparently because Peter was destined to survive and have a child with Olivia. (Which means that at some point, the wall between universes had to be breached, right?) Him having the child with Fauxlivia instead changed history in such a way that the Observers were willing to re-write the whole timeline to avoid it.
So why are they conquering the past? And why are they willing to kill the kid who was so desperately important to them a few seasons ago? There's no motive for their actions, and this late in the concluding half-season of the show, it doesn't look like we're going to get one. Frustrating, though I guess it's par for the course for an Abrams show. (Though I must say Fringe has done a hell of a lot better than Lost in keeping its mythos straight.)
This is not to say I hate the season; far from it. I just don't like it quite as much as the earlier ones. I do like the recurring themes of family and the fucked-upness thereof over generations and over iterations of different timelines. I roll my eyes at yet another show which feels compelled to give their main couple a Miracle Baby to show how special and destined they are, but hasn't a clue what to do with her once they have her, and just use her to milk angst from her parents. SORAS and a tragic death seems to be overdoing it a tad, but what the hell. (I suspect one reason that Olivia has been so passive this season is that Etta took over a lot of her Action Girl plot elements. Possibly now that she's dead, Olivia will get them back.)
All in all, I really, really like this show. I like the (mostly) intriguing worldbuilding. I like the cast of characters, in all their different incarnations. I've seen a lot of bitter Olivia fans complaining that it's become the Peter show, and they miss when she was the main character... but I don't think she ever was THE main character. Despite some creebs about this season, overall, I think the writers have done a pretty good job of balancing Peter, Walter and Olivia as a trio of main characters. Given all that's happened this season, I wonder if they have the balls to have this show end on a note of Greek tragedy, as Peter fails to be a better man than his father and ends up threatening to destroy worlds for the sake of his dead child, just as Walter did. And if Walter and/or Olivia have to take him down.
Probably not. We may be heading for a reset. But Fringe is one show where I wouldn't feel like a reset is cheating, because it's one of the major premises of the show that resets are possible, and indeed, have already happened multiple times. And the whole point of the show is that resets don't solve anything - they just hand you a different set of problems.
Rants Talk to me