Torchwood: the slash just fairly writes itself.
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| 2007-06-23 22:39 |
| Dr Who |
| Public |
 excited |
| Anchorage - Michelle Shocked |
| doctor who, tv |
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Loved Dr Who this evening, it was much better than I feared it would be. In fact, it was so gripping that I had to put my knitting down.
( Spoiler central... )
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| 2007-06-09 20:48 |
| I didn't really hide behind the sofa - but it was close! |
| Public |
| pleased |
| dr who, tv |
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Fuck me, that was a bloody brilliant and extremely scary episode of Doctor Who - real 'hiding behind the sofa' stuff.
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Susie Bright has a very funny anti-Bush video on her site but be warned, it's most emphatically not work safe.
![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) catvincent is a happy camper this evening because he got malabar and I into Heroes. We watched two episodes and loved it. There's just so much good tv on at the moment - Battlestar Gallactica, Life On Mars, Jericho, CSI, Waking The Dead. I'm not normally a big TV person but I will watch what I consider to be good stuff and Heroes has just made it onto the list.
What else is going on here? Half term, decluttering, working on the next show for the Here gallery, trying to get round to designing my website, phoning workmen, getting work done on the house, being ill, stressing about the end of the world, drawing and filling envelopes, reading crimes novels and art books, making delicious homemade lemon cheesecake with the Kidlet & knitting socks. Yup, that's pretty much my life at the moment. There isn't enough art in it.
I am going great guns on the decluttering thing though. I was inspired by The Seven Things Project, where a woman is trying to get rid of 7 things a week for a year. I don't feel like committing to doing that but I am trying to declutter very slowly. This week I'm trying to reorganise the cupboard in my study so that I have more storage space. Last night I went through and sorted out 6 thing to go on freecycle. 5 of them have found homes but no one seems to want a very beautiful old-fashioned typewriter with a couple of keys that stick. Oh well, perhaps I'll just put it in a different cupboard until I find a use or a home for it.
OK, bed now, still trying to get over the latest bout of insomnia.
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| 2007-02-10 00:52 |
| And I haven't even started on the muppets yet |
| Public |
| amused |
| Pandora's Aquarium - Tori Amos |
| humour, tv |
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Don't start watching Sesame Street videos on YouTube, you can lose a lot of time that way. This is my favourite so far - "Shake off the crumbs, gotta have a clean cake". No wait, now this one is my favourite. Or maybe this one. Ah, who am I kidding, I just like Sesame Street.
Cookie learns an important lesson - don't eat the art! I must remember this.
The Count writes letters to himself too - but does he do drawings on the back?
We sometimes sing bits of Healthy Food, C is for Cookie and Captain Vegetable round here. And we regularly count like The Count. despite no longer having a small child as an excuse (the teenager just rolls his eyes at us). We are sad geeks!
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| 2007-01-27 04:07 |
| Sorry, was today actually a day? |
| Public |
 tired |
| You're still standing there - Steve Earle & Lucinda Williams |
| other people's art, tv |
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Kurimoto Tanshuu (1756 - 1834) sketched wildlife during the Edo period and his style is funky and decidedly strange.
Cat introduced me to Shameless this evening and after two episodes I'm totally hooked. Today has been a tired day - I'm often a bit whacked the day after a massage and yesterday's was very deep and intense - so a bit of funny TV and some knitting was much appreciated.
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![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) ursulav has a very funny story about getting her Birkenstocks repaired.
If you read catvincent then you may have seen this already but I'm linking it too because it made me laugh so much that I had to watch it three or four times (it's short). I'm very excited to find out that Life On Mars is back next month. All this and Battlestar Galactica, Waking the Dead and Jericho too, surely my TV cup runneth over.
I've had a remarkably good day today. Had a useful and fun tutorial at jewellery this morning: I like my tutor more and more as the course goes on and I'll certainly be signing up for her class again in September. Whilst talking to her, I got clear on what I'm doing in jewellery at the moment and I feel I have more direction and focus now.
After that I went to the bank, then to Borders where I bought a couple of postcards and two books. I'd spent half my gift card a couple of weeks ago (I got a cool book on English design through the ages in the sale and a 3 CD set of The Sun Recordings by Johnny Cash) but I still had £15 left. Today I was very happy to find a half price book on paper making and book making and a book called Zen and the Art of Needlecraft, which I'm enjoying so far. Unfortunately when I got to the till I realised that the gift card was in my other bag so I still have £15 of birthday present left. Oh, and I bought an art magazine too. I've been crazy mad for buying books and magazines this month, clearly I've been feeling a bit deprived of reading matter or something.
I also picked up some food shopping and got some cool decorative stuff in the Habitat and Pier sales. I'm going to do a Chinese New Year altar to replace the Christmas one, which is looking very bedraggled so I was thrilled to find a red Chinese patterned candle, a dragon candle holder, a set of Chinese lantern fairy lights and a wooden dragon (one of the ones that come flat and you put them together yourself). They were all on sale too! I'm planning a trip to the Chinese supermarket in the next few days because we need rice noodles and I'm hoping to pick up some good paper decorations and maybe some nice fabric. I will also need some sort of pig imagery because we're moving into The Year Of The Pig. I was speaking to astvinr earlier and he was telling me some crazy stories about spontaneously combusting Chinese firecrackers. Apparently the Chinese authorities have huge problems every year with people accidentally blowing themselves up because the things just go off in their bags. Freaky.
Other good stuff:
Picking up my cute new glasses
Going to the art shop and the craft store and getting what I needed without spending too much money
Getting some tidying and cleaning done and making a delicious dinner (It's amazing how much domestic stuff you get done when you're trying to avoid doing your taxes!)
Watching Battlestar Galactica with Cat and going 'woah' a lot
Making a really involved object to go inside today's Diary Project envelope and having it turn out well
Now I'm going out to post the envelope, have a last cup of herbal tea and then fall down in an exhausted heap - er, I may have overdone it a tad.
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| 2007-01-09 23:02 |
| This make me happy |
| Public |
| excited |
| tv |
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Yay , Battlestar Galactica is back and I am doing the happy dance. And what a cliffhanger ending, I can't wait for next week's show.
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catvincent and malabar and I just finished watching the first season of Jeremiah, the post-apocalyptic show that J. Michael Straczynski did after Babylon 5.
We both really loved it, which made catvincent happy as he'd been wanting to show it to us for ages. Sadly, the second season was never shown in the UK and unlike season 1, it's not out on DVD. Unfortunately we don't have the first DVD either, just a rather jumpily edited 'taped of the tele' version but we still really enjoyed it. We thought the writing was good: it's very funny in places and there's a lot of excellent wise cracking between the two leads, Luke Perry and Malcolm-Jamal Warner. The acting performances are generally good, especially the two leads but also a lot of the supporting actors. The show looks authentically grubby, gritty and suitably end of the world plus there's a whole lot of cool conspiracy stuff too.There's the odd episode that doesn't quite gel, one or two apparent plot holes (although some of those are possibly answered in season 2) and the odd bit of dodgy camera work but overall it was a hit with us, not least because it raised a whole lot of interesting questions for us to discuss, which we always enjoy in a show.
Here's the basic premise of the show:
"In the year 2006 a virus wipes out everyone on the planet over the age of puberty. Jeremiah takes place 15 years later in 2021. The survivors are in their late twenties and younger and grew up without adult supervision. For 15 years they have been living on the scraps of the old world. Now they must either continue the downward slide, or begin to rebuild the world."
So apparently quite a few people didn't like this show, OK fair enough, it's SF and not everyone's cup of tea. Plus quite a few people couldn't deal with Luke Perry from Beverly Hills 90210 playing the lead but not being an American I didn't have that baggage to deal with and I really liked his performance in the show.
However, I was still surprised to read one review that criticised it because "not one human being left alive was bright enough to keep even electricity going".
Hello? What sort of dumb ass thinking is that?
Could you, as an adult get the electricity to work if the world fell apart tomorrow? I sure as hell couldn't. Shit, electricity might as well be magic for all I know about it. Oh look, I turn on the switch and it works - abra-fucking-cadabra!
Oh, and obviously you can't look it up on Google either - you have to physically go find some books that tell you how to do it. Now how about getting the electricity going when the world is falling apart all around you, when there's violence, rioting and people shooting each other over out-of-date cans of food, when you have to constantly struggle just to survive? Hey, good luck with that! I'm sure you'll have the internet back up and running of solar panels in a matter of weeks!
Even if you reckon you personally could get the electricity up and running, do you think your ten year old kid could do it if he or she didn't have an older person to teach them?
And even if you do manage to find a generator, work out how to operate it and get it going, where the hell are you going to get the fuel to run it? The tankers of oil stopped coming 15 years ago. Even if there are fuel depots still around that haven't already been drained, can you find them and get the fuel out? Maybe you could get the generator going with that can of diesel you've been saving for emergencies but that will only last for a tiny amount of time. Now how do you convert the generator so that it uses wood? Damn, there are no books that teach that...
In that sort of situation, electricity is a luxury - the words 'even the electricity' suggest that electricity is going to be one of the first priorities for anyone in that situation but it's quite simply not. In actual fact, electricity is a luxury you can only afford when you're in a settled society that has a lot of extra resources, including lots of spare useable fuel and people who have the time to research and develop it.
Besides all those salient points, the reviewer apparently missed the very clear fact that you do see several instances in Jeremiah where organised communities or individuals have got the electricity going. In one case it's explicitly made clear that they have figuring it out from books but that it's taken them several years to get all the right books together, work out all the different bits of knowledge from first principles and collect all the actual parts needed.
The reviewer in question also says "We're supposed to believe that not one kid was smart enough to read even one book on farming or manufacturing and so therefore the entire world has shut down."
This is also quite simply wrong, you see plenty of evidence of agriculture in the Jeremiah universe: you see people trading fresh produce, taking stuff to market on carts and growing stuff. There is also evidence of several different kinds of manufacturing, in one instance you see people building windmills and repairing stuff. And there is certainly plenty of evidence of alcohol being manufactured! (Hmm, is that agriculture, manufacturing or both?)
Certainly you don't large scale manufacturing anymore but that's inevitable because you no longer have the conditions to support it. You don't have working cities anymore and you don't have the organisation, the numbers of people, the economic conditions or the social control necessary for large scale production. However, manufacturing is quite clearly there, people are making things and they are trading the things they are making. But people have become tribal again: they are organised into small groups and they are therefore manufacturing on the sort of scale we did before the Industrial Revolution. They have small cottage industries with certain groups focusing on certain products or skill sets. In any society which has suffered a major apocalyptic collapse, nothing else is possible.
The entire world has shut down not because the kids didn't read books but because SOCIETY has completely broken down after an all-encompassing catastrophic event. Not only have millions of people died but those who were left were all under the age of 12 when this happened. How well do you imagine the average primary school class would do if left to their own devices?
Could your kid light a fire, chop wood, break into shops to get food, hunt, skin and cook an animal, catch fish, recognise which mushrooms are poisonous, grow their own vegetables, find the seeds to grow their own vegetables, know to save the seeds for the next year's planting, keep warm and dry through the winter with no central heating, mend or make their own clothes and protect themselves against other hungry violent kids?
Sad to say, but mine sure as hell couldn't!
If you don't have a kid, how well do you honestly think you would have done on your own at age 12 or younger? Could you have survived with no adults around but only other kids, some of whom are hostile and all of whom are traumatised by losing everyone in their family? I think I might have done a little bit better than the Kidlet because I grew up in a more outdoors-y family, but I still think I'd probably have died within the first year.
Frankly I think it's a fucking miracle that any of them survived at all, let alone that only 15 years later you see quite a few relatively well organised communities who are trying to rebuild some sort of society.
Sigh, as you can probably tell lazy, unimaginative and plain stupid reviewing really pisses me off. I don't mind if someone doesn't like a show and slates it - even if I don't agree with them, they're entitled to their opinion - but I do get irked when someone slates something for really badly researched or badly thought out reasons.
Ho hum, enough ranting, it's well past this little insomniac's bedtime.
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irritated
accomplished
sleepy