thessalian: (facepalm)
2011-11-26 02:43 pm

The Meme Returns

Here's this meme again. [livejournal.com profile] mitchy gave me age 25. Ooooooooh shit.

I was dating:
I wasn't, which was frankly a good thing. That year was a welter of therapy and trying to get my life back in order after I had a total mental breakdown and I really didn't have the headspace. I don't think I started seeing [livejournal.com profile] cholten99 until late 2003 or so.

I wanted to be:
Self-sufficient and sane, mostly. Well, as sane as I ever usually get, anyhow. Maybe it sounds simplistic, but it really wasn't. Basically, all I wanted was to get my life back in order and figure out how to make sure that the last year's events didn't repeat themselves. Which ... worked out pretty well, really.

My best friend:
That would have been [personal profile] redstapler, [livejournal.com profile] nightskywarlock and [livejournal.com profile] happypickle. Yes, they were entirely online but there's nothing particularly wrong with that.

I lived:
Half of it I spent in a flat about two blocks from my mother's place. At the time, it was deemed necessary for me to be close by in case of mental health issues (though really I think it had a lot more to do with being able to drop in unannounced whenever she felt like and bitch about my housekeeping). Then I moved out into a flat in Tooting where I was paying the rent pretty much on my own and had a lot more autonomy. Though I guess I never really felt comfortable there because the fact was that Mum pressured me into getting that one, even though I'd wanted a cheaper studio flat in Camden that I could afford without her input but she decided that it was too small and generally unsuitable and badgered me until I got the more expensive one-bed place that she helped me pay rent on. Yes, it was a nice place, but ... I wanted to live in Camden with less stuff that needed cleaning.

So ... yeah. That was age 25. Age 25 kind of sucked.
thessalian: (writing)
2011-11-25 03:07 pm

Memory Lane

I haz a meme. [livejournal.com profile] kelemvor givez it me. And he gave me age 17. TEENAGE ANGST GO!

I was dating:
Expect this to be complicated; I was seventeen. Let's see. For most of it, I was dating Gopi Flaherty, who was a year above me in school and ended up going to college in Pennsylvania while I was doing my last year of A-levels. There was a lot of off-again, on-again, both during the long-distance phase and not. But at least he was a waaaaay better kisser than my age-16 boyfriend...

I wanted to be:
Ah, that was when the big sea change happened. For most of my life prior to that, I wanted to be a veterinarian - or, more specifically, a marine zoologist as decided when I was about ten. Age seventeen was around when I was slogging desperately through a Chemistry A-level and a Maths AS-level that I could not get to grips with at all and I realised that I was not really cut out for this 'science' thing. Of course, that was also around the time I started writing anything other than diary entries. I don't even remember why I started, though I'd been writing things for as long as I can remember. I think my mother still has my first clumsily-written stories and a few copies of the newspaper I wrote, illustrated and sold around her office when I was little. Anyway, that was the point at which I decided that I wanted to be a writer. Thankfully, when I put my mind to it, I took to typing a lot better than I did to maths.

In terms of anything other than future plans, I wanted to be away most of all. That was the year I begged my mother to let me be a boarding student at the school I was in at the time, citing 'I'll be able to focus on my studies better' as a reason. Really, I just couldn't take ... well, her and David, mostly. Having every aspect of my life controlled (right down to diet and exercise regime, thank you; 45 minutes on the exercise bike every day, gods-awful microwave diet meals for dinner, and let's not talk about the time I found my mother reading my diary and having her tell me that I didn't have the right to think that way about her...) got really old, really fast.

My best friend:
Ah, the dream team. The concept of a singular best friend was pretty freakin' difficult once I moved to the UK the year previous. Mostly I was hanging around with Louise Baxter, Bryony Watson and Finn Pollard at the time. I guess at the end of the day, Louise was the best friend, if I had to choose. If there's a female equivalent of the term 'epic bromance' ... that was us.

I lived:
In Letchworth, Hertfordshire. Specifically, in a not-too-bad room in the house owned by my mother and now-stepfather. Though again, if I could have lived at my school, I would have leapt at the opportunity. At least by then I'd been allowed to redecorate the horrid place; when I moved in, it was peach carpet and this hideous wallpaper. The peach carpet stayed but I got to paint the walls, at least. The furniture was cheap crap and I had little privacy, but it was a place to lay my head, anyway. I was not sorry to leave.

So ... who wants in on this meme-thing?
thessalian: (Default)
2011-10-08 01:05 pm

This Post Brought To You By The Letter...

It's been awhile since I did memeage, so a doff of the hat to [livejournal.com profile] kelemvor for providing me with one. The idea is, comment to say that you want to take part, and I'll give you a letter. Then you post 10 things (±5) that you like beginning with that letter. I received the letter J, so here we go:

Welcome to Sesame Street, brought to you by... )

Right. I've wasted enough time. I really need to throw some clothes on and go shopping. Well, really I just need to throw some more clothes on; it's got nippy, which is good but probably not great for sitting around in one's nightshirt with the window open. Then I can settle in the house and just not leave until work on Monday. WOO!
thessalian: (writing)
2011-07-03 11:54 pm
Entry tags:

Meme-ish

Magically meme-licious for just before bed:

Give me three fictional characters, and I'll respond with shag/marry/push off a cliff.

In other news, actually been having fun with another Horde alt, this time Troll. *shrug* I guess I see why so many people prefer playing Horde. The start-up stories seem to be way better. I have no idea why. Though I found that my fondness for the Trolls means that starting up an Orc is a little difficult. Trolls? Not so hot on Hellscream. Orcs? Really cool on Hellscream. Fuck, I have no the hell idea. I honestly don't remember how the other races feel about their Warchief but I do vaguely recall that the Goblins mainly like the Orcs because ... well, hell, the Humans on the Alliance side blew them out of the water and the Orcs were kind of nice to them. Tauren are having their own shit going on, as are the Forsaken and the Belfs. I didn't pay much attention to Alliance politics; there wasn't a whole lot of connection between the races, really. Meh. I should probably start again, actually paying attention to the starting points this time. And maybe get some variation in my classes, 'cos right now it's Shaman, Shaman, Shaman, Hunter, Shaman... I tried Priest but that got old. Fast.

In other news, I gave up and watched A Game of Thrones. I liked some bits. The opening sequence is cool. The soundtrack is awesome. I love playing "I've Seen This Face Before". I do, however, have some problems with it. I like it a lot better when I can divorce it from the book. (And I still don't see the Theon/Jon/Robb OT3, guys; sorry.) I'd rant, but it's too late in the evening and it's work tomorrow. Woo.
thessalian: (DAO)
2011-06-25 01:21 pm
Entry tags:

Survivor Type

Okay, so I lied, but this looks interesting - a survival quiz courtesy [personal profile] twistedchick via [personal profile] ilyena_sylph. Let's see.

Survival! )

So ... yeah, I suppose I'd be good to have around in the event of an apocalypse turning up?
thessalian: (Default)
2010-08-15 10:12 pm

Playing Catch-Up

So I'm going to try this meme that [personal profile] mitchy came up with. 30 days of movies. I have a bad track record with these but ... well, you never know.

30 Days of Movie )

1. Favourite movie (or Top 5 Faves, Top 10 Faves, Top Oops I Got Carried Away)?

Yeeeeeeeeeah. This one's always a tricky one because so much is dependent on genre. I think Pump Up the Volume probably wins for sheer inspirational quality, though. It illustrates perfectly the teenage need to talk and break boundaries that has led to the blog generation. A lot of people take it for granted, really - the whole thing where they can say whatever they want to say on a public forum and not have anyone but a bunch of trolls come down on them. Back in the day, there was no forum like that and I imagine a lot of people didn't feel listened to at all.

Plus, some of the lines are just plain amazing.

In other news, back from Brighton and sometimes I just gotta wonder about my mother. I love her dearly, don't get me wrong, but ... well, I wonder, is all. I mean, she has some serious hypocrisy issues sometimes. But we had a good time notwithstanding. There was shopping and nice food and chatting and now I'm just kinda tired. Not in a bad way, mind.

Some of the shopping was books. I finally picked up a copy of Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Which was awesome, by the way - I recommend it. Though our trip to the Brighton Waterstone's lacked the awesome I found in a London branch of same, wherein I found a couple of copies of Mur Lafferty's Playing for Keeps. I also picked up a copy of Feed, by Mira Grant. One of you charming lot blogged about it and piqued my curiosity, and I am enjoying it immensely. I also see that it appears to be a series or at least a trilogy, with a second book coming out in May next year. We'll have to see whether I devour Feed (no pun intended) and wail that I have to wait too long for the next one.

As to my own writings ... I got hit by inspiration on Friday afternoon, when I was entirely unable to work on it. I've jotted down the basic premise (which kicks the arse of the last one, in my view, particularly in terms of overarcing plot - really the idea I had for the third book is better sub-plot somewhere else) and a few bits of dialogue that need cleaning up but I wanted to start it and longhand was all I had. Mum said something about a laptop for Christmas - one of the tiny ones, mayhap - so that's all good. She also said something about helping out with deposit and first month's rent on a flat, once I've got some money behind me to actually move. This is thrilling!

So yeah, there's been a lot going on and I'm sorry I've had radio silence. This shall be remedied. There are rants to be had!
thessalian: (Default)
2010-07-05 10:46 pm
Entry tags:

Day 29 - Current TV show obsession

Again, I can't really answer this because I still haven't really got one. I have shows I like watching, and the closest I can come is Eureka and Leverage (when you've dreamed about them at least once that you can recall, you know that there's definitely a part of your brain that has a jones for a show), but I wouldn't really call it a proper obsession.

Short and sweet and to the point again - tomorrow's probably won't be.

In other news, I have received bits of paper via email and I have to schedule appointments and things to hand in CRB forms and the like so that should be sorted by the end of the week. I hate the forms but if they'll get me into this job, I will COPE.

Also, I have got back into RPing again, lured into Chicago by Night by well-meaning enablers. Dissonance Society woo! (No, not the same Chicago where there was the unfortunate issue with the clueless ST who kept trying to throw sex-bombs at my asexual Corax and turned the whole thing into Laurell K Hamilton and bitched me out for using the term 'crotch-dropping' IC. A different Chicago. With, like, sane people.)
thessalian: (Default)
2010-07-04 08:29 pm
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Day 28 - First TV show obsession

I can't answer this one. I can't. I have never been obsessed with a show. Not really, deep-down, 'cannot miss it or I will die' obsessed. So ... sorry; this entry is going to be short. I mean, there's never really been an "I love this show and want its babies" show. I reserve that for book series, I guess?

HR Lady is supposed to ring me tomorrow to sort out my CRB checks and everything. Fingers crossed!
thessalian: (Default)
2010-07-03 10:43 pm
Entry tags:

Day 27 - best pilot episode

Um. This is getting harder and harder. In the end, it's a toss-up between Wonderfalls and Leverage, and I could not for the life of me tell you why. There's something about them that just grabbed me when I didn't necessarily expect them to. They both set up the plot wonderfully, and while I loved the Firefly pilot, it didn't quite sum up everything as well as those other two did.

I guess I'm not very talkative on the subject - I'm better at ranting.

On that subject, I'm currently front-burnering HIPPIE Book 3, which has no title as yet but has a general plot at least, and a lead-in to what I imagine is going to be a very interesting Book 4. That'll be fun.

I also owe fic. There's three different ways I could take the same prompt, see. Argh.

Don't mind me. I've been operating under a migraine for the last little while. It seems to be fading but still there's a bit of residual groggy. I hope it stays far, far away.
thessalian: (Default)
2010-07-02 06:18 pm
Entry tags:

Day 26 - OMG WTF? Season Finale

Okay, this one is allllllll kinds of tricky. When I think "OMGWTF?!?", I think the sort of thing that gets the reaction that, say, Lost did, or The Sopranos, or that last thing with Supernatural. The ones that get wank, I basically mean. Most of my shows? They don't go out that way. ...Well, mostly.

I'm also wondering if I can count Neon Genesis Evangelion as 'TV', but that kind of comes under the heading of 'Mini-series, a couple of movies and guaranteed 100% mindfuck'. Soooooooo ... not so much TV, then. Then again, that's anime all over - or at least, the sort I generally watch. Lain and Eva and Boogiepop Phantom and suchlike ... dude, that's just all over OMGWTF. But it's mostly awesome OMGWTF, so it can be forgiven. Encouraged, even.

So for the sort of OMGWTF we're talking about here, it's a tie. Both by the same man, more or less. Two words; Toclafane and Abbadon. Yep, for me, crappy ending = a tie between Torchwood S1 season finale and Doctor Who S3 season finale.

I'm never entirely sure what happens when Davies writes the Master. There are moments where Simms-as-Master have such gravitas and terror and feeling and awesome. And then there are the atrocious puns and the gurning fits and I thought that Davies was supposed to admire the Master! So why does he reduce him to puns about the Master Race or that horrible bit of business with the journalist screaming behind the door? It was supposed to be a horrible scene! But it was "close door - silence. Open door - screaming. Close door - silence descends. Open door - still screaming. Close door - silence descends again" and it was appalling! The plot itself promised great things but eventually degenerated to Doctor Messiah Complex and dear gods what ham-handed scripting.

Meanwhile, we have the finale of Torchwood S1. We have the thing coming from the darkness - coming for Jack. It had such potential. It could have been something subtle and horrific and shudder-worthy. What it was, in the end, was bad CGI. Bilys was awesome. Abbadon ... less awesome by a very long way. It was a shrieking disappointment and gyeh.

I can't decide between the two as my worst foam-at-the-mouth about a season finale. So ... I won't try. I have other things to natter about anyway. Namely ... JOB! *ahem* Seriously, I got two phone calls - one from the office manager, one from the HR department over at Hospital - saying that pending references and CRB check, the job is miiiiiiiiiiiine! No having to compete with someone else for a consultant's affections when I don't even know the criteria! Just "We will clear your paperwork and then you start work, okay?" I don't know how long the CRB check is going to take or how long it'll take my references to come through but it can't possibly be that long, right? Well, I'll probably stress like crazy until my name's on a contract (I honestly don't know what could go wrong at this point but I don't want to tempt fate by relaxing too soon, y'know?) but I'm tentatively going YAY!!!!!!! a lot.
thessalian: (Default)
2010-07-01 01:11 pm
Entry tags:

Day 25 - A show you plan on watching (old or new)

[personal profile] mitchy's computer seems to be over its peaceful shut-down protest, fingers crossed, and so I can catch up with meme. There is no shortage of show that I plan on watching at some point, though to be fair ... most of them I've technically watched before. Look, sometimes I catch shows out of the corner of my eye, didn't look interested (and possibly wasn't at the time, at least not overly) and never made the effort to catch again. But I'm going to try for the ones that I've only seen fleeting episodes of and thus really need to catch up on.

The first one that comes to mind is True Blood. Okay, I liked the books better than Twilight. But then, I prefer stepping on thumbtacks to Twilight. Thing is, I like the show ever so much better than the books. However, to my chagrin, I have only caught a few episodes of the actual show when they happened to be on and I never managed to catch all the rest. So I've seen bits of S1 and a few episodes of S2 (including the finale) and that's about it, really. I do plan on catching up at some point, and catching all the eps I've missed. Pretty much the same with the remake/re-imagining of V, which I happened to notice on SyFy and really rather liked. I just haven't got around to it yet - partially because I'm mainlining Eureka S3.

Then there are shows that I have never seen at all, and I blame [personal profile] lithiumdoll for even getting me curious about these ones - the Sarah Connor Chronicles, The Vampire Diaries and Sons of Anarchy. All her fault. She is a horrible corrupting influence and she remakes all things fangirls in her image and EEEEEEEEEEVIL.

...But, y'know, in a good way. In fact, in a similar way to [personal profile] mitchy, who has got me into more TV on average than anyone in my life EVER. Though to be fair, if I caught up with everything that [personal profile] lithiumdoll got me curious about, she might win on points.

OHEY WANT SOME IRONY? Something just occurred to me. Look, see, character names are hard, okay? Generally they get cribbed from a mish-mash of names collected over the years. I'm ahead of the curve in that I've spent ten years of my life looking at medical records and could cobble a name together as well as or better than any name randomiser programme, but picking a name for a specific character requires a certain amount of trial and error. So I ended up with surnames that I can identify as coming from: an 80s sitcom*, a sci-fi novel, a horror novel, a webcomic, and the name of the street I was living on at the time.

In the case of that last? What I could not have known at the time is that HIPPIE's leader, brains and all-around mastermind Rachel Hutton shares the same surname as the actor who plays the guy who performs a similar function on Leverage. It amused me.

* - Carl M Tanner was named when I was seventeen or so. He featured in a short story that has since been lost to the mists of time and floppy disc corruption (AND THANK FUCK FOR THAT IT WAS AWFUL). Ironically, a friend of mine used the same name for a character he played in my tabletop Mage campaign some years ago. Yay irony?
thessalian: (Default)
2010-07-01 11:03 am
Entry tags:

Day 24 Catch-Up - Best Quote

Yeah ... that one's a pretty big question for someone who's still feeling the tail-end of migraine from hell. A lot of it depends on mood, of course, and even more on context and in-scene action.

Y'know what? Because I'm a little behind schedule, I'll go for, not the classics, but something that has existed in one form or another for ages:

"Hello. I'm the Doctor. Basically ... run."

It'll do. I mean, given it was coming out of the mouth of a Doctor that looks like what I might call Fetus!Registrar...

Okay, so the reason this didn't get posted yesterday was because [personal profile] mitchy's computer came down with a bad case of the Shutdown Blues. Basically just switched off and wouldn't switch back on again. We cleaned it out, we tightened connection cables ... nada. So I was offline for the forseeable future. The computer seems to be working for the moment but I am still watching it with a wary eye.
thessalian: (Default)
2010-06-29 01:44 pm
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Day 23 - Most Annoying Character

Another complicated question for the 30 Days of TV meme. Because ... you know, do we include characters who are supposed to be annoying? Because there are a lot of TV characters who are supposed to be annoying and it seems shameful to hold it against them.

So instead, for those few Ultraviolet fans on my flist, I will go with Kirsty. She's whiny. She's clingy. She's childish. She's more or less useless and on the whole, she's nothing more than a plot device. And she's supposed to be the love interest and I don't get why. I do not see chemistry between her and Michael. I don't know what he sees in her - what any sane man sees in her, frankly. I wanted to shake Michael and scream, "Oh, for pity's sake, go get back together with Frances! She obviously still loves you and you two have chemistry and she has a brain!" She needed a life in the worst possible way, as per commentary from her undead ex-fiance, and dear gods do I wish there'd been better writing or something for that character so I could see why the male lead was pining over her so. Beyond her being pretty.

...Basically, she's Bella Swan.

On that subject, I got pointed at this fine review of the latest Twilight film. Yeah, Eclipse is out and they're actually making Breaking Dawn (how they're going to keep that movie PG-rated I have no idea) so it's not over yet. I will be glad when it is, but I somehow think that, given "The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner" ... Meyer isn't going to let it be over until the publishers can't wring any more money out of her. She's got an ego the size of Cleveland and a nearly psychotic belief in the power of 'her vision', and her publishers just see dollar signs. I almost feel sorry for her because I know the day will come when the Twilight fad has passed and the publishers aren't fawning all over her anymore and she likely won't have the foggiest clue what to do with herself when she realises that when they said they appreciated her artistic vision, they meant 'the money they were making out of a bunch of teenage girls'. (Because let's face it, no matter how old they are - whether one's Twihard is a high school student, uni student, housewife, career woman or 83-year-old granny - they are still, in heart and mind, teenagers.)

I still wish I knew why Twilight even got published. It's not like it's new and innovative storytelling. I mean, Charlaine Harris was doing it years before anyone had ever heard of Meyer ... okay, without the sparkles, but still. I swear, I have no idea what her agent or publisher or both were smoking...
thessalian: (Default)
2010-06-28 06:11 pm
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Day 22 - Favourite Series Finale

Tricky, tricky question. Again, I haven't been back into watching TV for long; there was a pretty huge gap in which I wasn't watching TV at all. I don't actually remember a lot of series finales from when I was a kid, and now? Well, either I'm lucky enough to be a fan of shows that are still going, and thus haven't had a real series finale yet, or I'm unfortunate enough to be a fan of a show that either a) ended before its time or b) went on a couple of seasons too long. So I ask myself whether I can count season finales as well as series finales ... and then decide that pulling that shit is just going to make the choice a lot harder. Broader scope, you know? Too many possibilities. So I'll stick with genuine, bona fide, 'I absolutely know it was the last episode' series finale.

And I'm going to go with Angel. But I'm not going for it because it was particularly good television, exactly. I'm going with that that particular series finale because it was good for what it was. And 'what it was' was a brilliant piece of last-minute television to tie up loose ends.

I'm the sort of Whedon fan who, while not actively loathing S6 and S7 of Buffy, thought that the series would have been much better had it ended with "The Gift". In my view, Whedon has what Stephen King refers to as 'diarrhoea of the word processor'. He came up with a brilliantly satisfying point of narrative closure with "The Gift" (S5 finale, for those not in the know) and ... sure, how he progressed from there started pretty cool but ended up as the start of a horribly preachy season of television. Not that it didn't have moments ("I'd like to test that theory" being the main one), but ... yeah, spoiled the shiny narrative closure. I wasn't a fan. Joss Whedon needs to learn when to call it quits.

In the case of Angel, Fox made that decision for him. He didn't have a lot of time to come up with an ending, as Fox told him that he had three episodes to wrap it up. For a last-minute finale, it was damn good, in my view. And as last lines go, "Personally? I kind of want to slay the dragon. ...Let's go to work" is pretty awesome, I feel.

(I am ignoring the comic. I refuse to pay attention to 'After the End'. You can't make me.)

Tomorrow? 'Most Annoying Character'. Ooooooooooooh that's going to take some thought.

So in other news, I had a job interview today. Getting there was relatively easy (train to Fins Park, bus to Hackney), but getting around the hospital ... I had main reception send me to Outpatients. I had Outpatients send me to a nurse's station. I had a nurse from said nurse's station send me to an outpatient clinic upstairs in another building. I had a secretary from that clinic send me back downstairs and to an entirely different building - again. And finally, when the department I was supposed to find (Rehabilitative Neurology, in point of fact - counterintuitive when you're interviewing for gastro-enterology, but they were probably short on interview space up in gastro) turned out to be poorly marked and not actually on the site map, it was only a lovely porter pointing me in the right direction that saved me from throwing something at a wall. From five minutes early, I ended up ten minutes late. Lucky me, the interviewers were running late themselves. My actual interview came an hour after I finally arrived at the unit, and I don't think they even realised I ran late. This is why I bring a book to these things. On the whole, leaving aside the issues with being pointed hither, thither and yon around the hospital, I think the interview went well, and I hope to hear from them soon. *crosses fingers*
thessalian: (Default)
2010-06-27 10:58 pm
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Day 21 - Favourite Ship

I don't really do the 'shipping thing, as I think I've said before. I suppose I can root for relationships to a point, but not to the point where I feel particularly cheated when they don't happen (Vaughn Rice/Angie Marsh from Ultraviolet, for example). In fact, there are some instances where I honestly don't think that any of the available 'romance options' available for a character are appealing (Allison Blake in Eureka, for example; I don't reckon she needs Nathan or Jack in her life). But for relationships that I have watched and thought well done? It's got to be Wes/Lilah from Angel.

I think the thing I liked best about their relationship was the fact that it developed, which is more than one can say for some of the core relationships (Buffy/Angel; Cordelia/Angel; Fred/Gunn). They danced around each other in a particularly interesting way. When it came to the sex, the gloves were off, particularly for Wes; he didn't have to worry about being the good guy; he could let loose in ways he wouldn't with a woman he ... I was going to say 'respected', but he does respect Lilah, in a bizarre kind of way. Their entire relationship is twisted but tinged with affection, and is one of the most multi-dimensional and multi-faceted romantic/sexual relationships I've seen. And it ended just as it ought to have, I think - they were never going to end up bounding off into the sunset happily ever after, and I thought that Lilah's death was one of the few 'death of a love interest' that really worked on more levels than the joke that "No one's allowed to be happy in a Whedon show".

There's really not much to say on 'ships. Tomorrow: favourite series finale. That, I should be able to talk about more.

Of course, I'll have more to blog about tomorrow anyway. Tomorrow's the job interview. I just hope my near-terminal insomnia clears up by that point. I have my outfit planned and I know what I intend to say and it'll all be well. Fingers crossed!
thessalian: (Default)
2010-06-26 01:21 pm
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Day 20 - Favourite kiss


...*incoherent sputtering*

See, my problem isn't exactly having a hard time picking a favourite. My problem is that I have a hard time actually remembering any. The kissing is not the part that sticks in the mind for me, when I'm watching any given show. And if it doesn't stick, I can't really remember it to tag it as 'favourite' in the confines of my head, right?

So thank the gods for Buffy, which contains most of the memorable kisses. No, it's not the Once More With Feeling thing. No, it's nothing with Angel. In fact, it doesn't really involve Buffy at all. The kiss that really sticks with me is the Willow/Tara kiss at the end of the Season 6 episode 'Entropy'. Also, to be perfectly honest, it's as much because of the pre-kiss dialogue as anything else. So Willow and Tara have been broken up for awhile because of that hackneyed, unutterably annoying "magic = drugs" thing (which, don't get me started) but they'd been hanging out and having coffee and flirting at each other and all of a sudden, Tara turns up in Willow's room, and thus there is dialogue:

Tara: There's just so much to work through. Trust has to be built again on both sides. You have to learn if - if we're even the same people we were. If you can fit in each others lives. It's a long and important process, and can we just skip it? C-Can you just be kissing me now?

It's not the kiss itself, though that is awesome and projects that sense that they're both ferociously desperate to be kissing and trying to be gentle and delicate because they're afraid the other's going to disappear if they mmake one wrong move. It's the acting the two do in that moment before the kiss that always gets me. The look on Tara's face, like she's just about to cry, coupled with the little break in her voice in the last two syllables, followed by how Willow's face lights up and then, boom - there is the kissing. And that, to me, is an awesome kiss.

Tomorrow: 'Favourite Ship'. That's going to be relatively easy. I don't pay much attention to the shipping thing either, but at least I can remember the canon pairings better than I can the kissing. And I don't ship out of canon. *ponders Vaughn Rice/Angie March* ...Okay, I don't ship out of canon when the possibility has been utterly shut down, anyway.
thessalian: (Default)
2010-06-25 01:39 pm
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Day 19 - Best TV show cast


I saw this question coming and said, "This meme hates me and wants me to suffer". I mean, seriously, isn't the entire point of a show its cast? Admittedly, everyone looks for something different in their ideal cast, but on the whole, if they can act worth a shit and have chemistry, I call it a win. Pretty is an optional extra. If shows don't manage that a reasonable amount of the time, odds are that I won't watch it.

So, with all of the shows I've watched to choose from, I'm going to go with an old classic: MASH. MASH was always a really weird show because, like the film and the book before it, the show turned around and tried to balance genuine tragedy with every kind of humour from witty one-liners to outright slapstick. That was, in fact, the entire point of the show - how people got dragooned into hell and tried to keep working and sane any way they could. It takes a hell of an actor to pull that kind of thing off and do it well, not to mention the effort it takes to do all that and portray a solid three-dimensional character.

That's what the cast of MASH had to work with. It would have been easy for Loretta Swit to play Hot-Lips Houlihan as some vacuous tramp whose bedpost-notches were judged by their military rank. I don't even know how Larry Linville managed to make Frank Burns remotely sympathetic. And I don't really know why Hawkeye Pierce never got on my nerves, but I attribute that more to Alan Alda's acting than anything else. MASH's characters were caricatures, more or less, but the cast turned those caricatures into real characters, with dimensions and depth and all the things that caricatures tend not to have. So while there are a lot of honourable mentions (Leverage, Firefly, Wonderfalls etc) ... I have to go with the classics.

I'm also convinced that Miss Piggy was based on Margaret 'Hot-Lips' Houlihan. But I could be wrong. *g*

On the subject of TV show casting: Jonathan M Woodward. Buffy, Angel, Firefly and now NCIS ... is there anything in which he doesn't play a vaguely slimy, vaguely villainous smug tit? Why do they keep casting him like this? Is it the innocent-face? Is it that he gives good snivel? Has he just got typecast as 'sort of villainous; not even remotely worthy of Big Bad status but will never be seen as a good guy ever again because of how he was cast in Whedon's stuff"? I kind of feel bad for him, y'know? Snivelling lackey just seems a harsh way for someone's career to go.
thessalian: (Default)
2010-06-24 07:22 pm
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Day 18 - Favourite title sequence

I've given this one a fair bit of thought, as [personal profile] mitchy brought it up last night and it caused a bit of debate. To be fair, I don't watch a lot of title sequences because I watch a lot of my shows on DVD and can easily skip them. Being able to skip the viewing of the same title sequence once every forty minutes or so when one's mainlining a TV show is important to one's sanity.

I admit to adoring the Doctor Who title sequence, but I also admit that a) I mostly had the love for the S1-S4 version (I'm a little 'meh' about the current season's) and b) it's mostly down to the music. I can't really pick a favourite title sequence based solely on the music. If I was simply going for music and artistry, I'd probably pick Carnivale's entry sequence, based on the fact that while it doesn't necessarily give you much of a clue as to what the show's about, it's very good at giving you the mood of the piece. The pictures set a timeline while the audio gives an impression of ominousness.

Objectively speaking, though, the best title sequence I've ever seen is the one on Burn Notice. Not only does it manage to give every bit of background on the show that you could ever need without being overly wordy, not only does it introduce the main characters in a fairly unobtrusive way, but it also fits in with the tone of the show so well that it doesn't necessarily stand out as a 'title sequence'. Nice and unobtrusive, yet still serving the function of a title sequence, and then some. That makes it more watchable than the average title sequence to me. And in the interest of fairness, those criteria put Farscape as a close second for me; Burn Notice only wins by virtue of being a little better at character introduction. I like the Farscape title theme music very much.
thessalian: (Default)
2010-06-23 10:41 am
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Day 17 - Favourite mini-series

I ... think I know what this means? But to be fair, there aren't many shows that I've actually seen that fall into this category at all. So leaving aside series that were truncated by default, and discounting Torchwood: Children of Earth entirely because it was a mini-season rather than a mini-series, I'm going for a tiny little barely-known British programme called "Ultraviolet".

Yes, I know, everyone has heard of the film. This is not the film. It involves vampires, to a point, but this is not your special effects-riddled action flick. In fact, you don't see a terrible lot of violence and you almost never see fang. This little six-ep series shows vampires as more of a financial and political force, a group of psychological manipulators who just happen to survive by drinking blood. They're not monstrous because of their diet; in fact, it's the more human parts of their behaviour patterns that make them truly evil. The Ultraviolet I know is a combination of political/law enforcement thriller, sci-fi programme and just a tiny bit of soap opera. We're not talking "vampires seeking redemption and true love" here.

So let's talk about the cast for a moment. First of all, Jack Davenport. I don't think I need to tell anyone who's seen Pirates of the Caribbean (any of the PotC films, really) why this fact is an automatic recommendation. There's also Stephen Moyer, who some of you may recognise as 'Vampire Bill' on True Blood. (Or, because he has changed a lot since 1998, maybe not.) We've also got Idris Elba, who's apparently done a lot of cop shows - including the title role in new series Luther - but whose most recent role that I actually saw was Stone in 28 Weeks Later. We also get Corin Redgrave for awhile, and the rest of the cast, while not quite so well-known, is actually pretty good. (And the 'love interest' I quietly spent the series wishing would die in a fire played a shape-shifting alien in the episode of Torchwood where Gwen finally marries Rhys. Seeing that ep of Torchwood was when I realised that wishing the character in Ultraviolet would die in a fire was actually to do with hating the character rather than bad acting. Which is okay. I don't have to like all the characters. There are allowed to be wastes of space so long as they're actually meant to be wastes of space.)

I grant that this programme is not an easy one to find. It is available on DVD (which means that it's probably available for torrent somewhere) but since I got my copy years ago from some 3-for-£10 sale at a hole in the wall on Charing Cross Road, I don't know if it's still widely available. I assume these things go out of print after awhile, same as books, and the show is twelve years old. Still, it is definitely worth a watch if ever there's opportunity.
thessalian: (Default)
2010-06-22 07:46 pm
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Day 16 - Your guilty pleasure show


Yeaaaaaaaah, it's got to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I shouldn't really feel guilty about liking this particular show; it's the lead character I have issues with. The more I watch this show the more I think it ought to be renamed "Psychological Problems: The Series (now with vampires)". It's got its seriously good moments, but mostly it's there for the one-liners and the pretty. I admit to it being a guilty pleasure because it's really such fluff, at the end of the day. It pretends at moral conundrums that it never entirely delivers and peppers it all with the one-liners and the pretty, and calls it ground-breaking television. I don't see the feminism that a lot of people laud the show for, for a start. Buffy herself strikes me as whiny and irritating and, as with most Whedon shows, I watch it for the supporting characters, who have far more interesting character arcs than the broody, morally overweighted, romantically and emotionally crippled leads.

I'm just sayin'.