damkianna: A cap of Mal from Firefly, with accompanying text: "I'm the only John Wayne left in this town." (I'm the only John Wayne left.)
[personal profile] damkianna
I have tomorrow off because I'm working on Saturday, which means 1) I will have plenty of time to psych myself up for the ordeal my anxiety issues make out of a trip to the dentist, and 2) for most of next week, I will have no friggin' idea what day of the week it is. (Or I wouldn't, if it weren't for my watch, which I will undoubtedly have to check at least fifty times a day.)

But! Far more interestingly, I caught the newest episode of Warehouse 13. Mostly because I was too lazy to change the channel over to Covert Affairs at 9:00 - but I have no doubt that USA will replay it, so I'm not super worried about it. And it was so worth it. HG WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLS, OMG. I adore her a truly ridiculous amount, and I ship her with Myka like burning. I really like Artie, but I was actually starting to get mad at him for being so mean to her, and I'm glad he changed his mind by the end; this is going to seriously bite me in the ass if she really is evil or something, but she was strikingly patient with the way he kept pulling guns on her and talking like she wasn't right in front of him and blowing her equipment's circuits, in both this episode and the last one.

I was sort of nervous for a while that the thing about kissing in the orchard was going to be a big push in a Pete/Myka direction. Which I am okay with in the abstract, but shoving a kiss into the finale just to ratchet up the tension when there's been no particular build in that direction would have been weird and stupid. The actual reason was so, so much better; I'm so glad that Rebecca got to go out on her own terms, and she and Jack were very sweet. (I now want to write fic about them, in point of fact.) Also, hello there, surprise!Quark. How do you keep popping up in places I'm not expecting you, Armin Shimerman?

The choice of villain was interesting; I feel like the magazine guy's surprise feminism kind of came out of nowhere, but the exchange between him and his wife ("I wish you'd loved me more." "Those poor girls. I wish you'd loved me less.") was decently well done. I don't totally get why he didn't pull the knife out of her - had the glassing process gone too far to be reversed? Were they certain she was going to die anyway? Or did they seriously just let her die on purpose? o.O

Mostly, though, I have to admit, I spent the whole ep with my face like this: ♥.♥ HGGGGGGGGG.

Also, even though I am completely sure that no one cares, I have a moderate number of thoughts about one of the books I bought the other day - Myst: The Book of Ti'ana. I actually adore the entire Myst franchise to a really ridiculous extent, even though I'm still not sure I completely understand the most recent games (partly because I have not yet played all the way through them, since my current computer can't handle them). The concept of writing a description of a world down in a book, and then being able to travel to the result? I'M SO SOLD.

And, bonus, a couple of the games brush the edges of the issues that arise from that process, particularly when the worlds have people in them - was the world created by the writing of the book, or did it already exist somewhere in the multiverse and you just built a door to it? Does it matter, when it comes to the rights of the people who live in it? There's lots of hardcore conversations about colonialism and exploitation implicit in the premise.

Which is part of the reason I was, in the end, kind of disappointed in the Book of Ti'ana. For starters, I felt a little misled; despite the title, the book's at least half, if not more than half, about Aitrus, rather than Anna-Ti'ana. The parts that were about Anna-Ti'ana were reasonably good: she was strong and smart and interesting. But there weren't nearly enough of them. I also felt a little cheated by the story; there was some fighting and politicking about Anna-Ti'ana and whether she was as much of a person as the D'ni and such and so forth, and I was hoping it was going to build up into a big war of ideas and possibly a political revolution, given all the little hints about how skeezy D'ni society can be sometimes. But ... that's not really what happened. The bits that seemed to be pointing to that confrontation kind of petered out so that we could spend some time on how Anna-Ti'ana and Aitrus got married and had Gehn, and the discrimination against Anna-Ti'ana kept happening, and in the end, Anna-Ti'ana had to flee with Gehn because the bad guy sort of half-won. :P So the story I was hoping for really didn't get told.

Stylistically, it also felt pretty obvious to me that this book was filling in the backstory of a pre-existing franchise - which, filling in backstory isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but being obvious about that being your purpose ... doesn't lend itself to really engaging books. I'm glad I know so much about how the D'ni drill tunnels, but I don't think all of it was worth putting in there.

Still, I liked Anna-Ti'ana; I liked Aitrus; and I have to admit to being a little tickled by the conflict with Veovis. It read half like he was a bigoted jerk, and half like he was secretly in love with Aitrus and deeply bitter about it. And it was nice to be back in that universe. I'll have to dig out the games again sometime. Maybe when I get a new computer. :D

I sort of can't wait 'til tomorrow; it'll be a nice break. (Except for the inevitable panic about the dentist's, of course. D:)

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damkianna: A cap of the Reverend Mother from the Dune miniseries, with accompanying text: "Space cowgirl." (Default)
'tis not so deep as a well

October 2022

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