*eyes calendar*

[nenya_kanadka]

Okay, so, two months is certainly not the longest I've gone without updating LJ, but for someone with over a hundred icons, it's rather ridiculous.

Between having post-holiday-fest writer's block and getting an ereader for my birthday, I've been reading a lot more than I've been writing lately. It's been Actual Books more than fanfic, for the most part, although GrabMyBooks and the AO3 download function mean I can read just about anything on the Kobo. Which means I can read longfic on work breaks or on the bus, instead of just at my computer. Hurray for portability!

Back in February I decided to watch all the Lost episodes with Danielle Rousseau in them, because I like Mira Furlan but didn't think the show itself was all that interesting. So over the course of a couple of weeks, muccamukk saw me go through the Lost fan's emotional arc, highly condensed. ("Oh, interesting!" "Neat characters!" "...WTF are they doing to Sayid?" "Who with the smoke monster what now?" "The hell, Ben?" "WTF Jack's emo beard of manpain?" "I hate this island so much but I can't stop watching!" Mercifully, the finale intervened at that point. I still don't get the finale. But I like Claire and Charlie and Sayid and Danielle and Kate.)

I then inhaled all of bachlava's post-canon AU fixit fic for Danielle and Alex, because seriously, show? That was Tasha-Yar-and-the-giant-oil-slick levels of pointless character death, there. (No, I don't care about Ben's drama over getting Alex killed. Cult leader = dnw.) Lovely, lovely fic, hit a whole bunch of my narrative kinks for characters surviving certain kinds of trauma and taking care of each other afterward.

I also finally got around to reading both Redshirts by John Scalzi and Ana Mardoll's Pulchritude, which I'd been meaning to for a while. I'd probably rate both of them a B+.
Redshirts is of course a parody novel of sorts, dedicated to the junior crewmen who get offed to show that the situation is serious. The writing moved along very quickly, and was kind of light in tone with a lot of short declarative sentences. And then it took a left turn at Albuquerque and I found it a lot more interesting. But it was the last two of the three codas that really grabbed me. (I'm a sucker for secondary characters getting to tell their side of the story, so I suppose it's fitting that third-string characters from a novel about redshirts should be the ones that made me tear up a little.)

Pulchritude (Goodreads reviews) is a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast". I somehow missed that it had an unhappy ending, so when the story suddenly ended tragically, I was surprised. (Though I think some of that surprise came from looking at the page count and thinking that at 160 pages out of 250, I had a lot more story to go--but the last 100 pages are all meta: character biographies and deconstructions of other versions of the folktale.) I really loved the stepsister characters; they were fleshed out and made interesting and given their own personalities. And the stepmother was actually heroic and on the heroine's side! I guessed the twist ending a little before the characters did, though, and thought they would realize what was going on and avert the disaster about to unfold. But no: rocks fall, everyone dies. :(

Other things I've used the ereader for:

--the PsyCop novels by Jordan Castillo Price (featuring a gay medium (as in psychic) cop, and a LOT of fanfic-level NC-17 slash sex)

--Dark Mirror by Diane Duane, in which Picard, Troi, and Geordi La Forge (with the help of an OC who is totally a wizard from the Young Wizards universe) run into their evil counterparts in the Mirror Universe. Evil!Troi realllllly likes putting people in Agony Booths. :/ But our!Troi and Geordi save the day and it is lovely.

--The Practice of Barrayaran Sex by Philomytha (Aral and Cordelia's wedding/wedding night)

--221B Barrayar by Wandering (Lord Auditor Sherlock Holmes and Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan take a case together, whilst Watson and Ivan share identical looks of admiring horror)

Writing-wise, I'm ignoring all my WIPs in favour of something with OCs that exactly one other person on the planet cares about. It's, er, better than nothing? But then, Mucca's in town; when Mucca's in town I tend to watch more canons (see above: we're also following Elementary and doing a TNG rewatch) and write less. Maybe when she buckles down to her latest fest-fic, I'll Kitten War my way to victory.

Comments

[nenya_kanadka]

IT SO IS! I forget where I heard about it, possibly on an anon meme somewhere or something, but honestly it's amazing. I can read all the things! In comfort! :D! The only downside is that it doesn't seem to work for me in Chrome, but that's what I have Firefox for, so.

And yes, I completely agree about Tumblr. I'm glad I've got all y'all friended over there, but it's not quite the same. *hugs, clings to LJ/DW flist*

...you must at least know Star Trek: TNG to some extent, yes? Since you're a DS9er.

[justice_turtle]

I've seen... all the Q episodes of TNG and maybe five others, years ago. ^_^ I know who everyone is and all, but I just never really latched onto the TNG crew the way I did the Niners. (I think it was largely the writing put me off. Since I was trying to watch recommended episodes from the first two seasons, and all. *g*) And then I fell off the watching-anything train for a couple years there. So it's not like I have any opinions beyond "LWAXANA!!!! :D" and "baby Riker is so weird" and "Geordie, will you ever stop being an asshole to Data?" and things like that. But "All Good Things" is the best series finale ever and this I will defend. *nods*

[underthewillows]

Oh, first two seasons of TNG are pretty bad. They basically veer between pointless remakes of Original Trek episodes and doing their own original pointless episodes :-)

Then they settle down, get a handle on the characters, and decide to write stories about the next generation, so it gets good from then on.

"Dark Mirror" by Diane Duane - yes, yes and yes! The audacity of rewriting (slightly) Shakespeare fits so beautifully into the Mirrorverse, where leaving one bit-part character out of a play makes a huge amount of difference. Then again, Duane Trek is the best Trek novelisations, in my opinion.

[nenya_kanadka]

Yeah, it tends to take these shows a while to get off the ground, but very likely moreso for a spinoff like TNG. It had to figure out what kind of show it was trying to be. The sad part about that is that Tasha Yar didn't make it into the later seasons--I think she would have been awesome later on. (She was pretty cool in that one episode with the alt timeline, even. All brave and willing to take a personal risk to save the rest of the galaxy and stuff.)

I was a little put off by the space dolphin because it seemed a little bit...self-congratulatory or something, if you know the 'verse he's drawn from, but after the first chapter or so things smoothed out and it was all about my favourite canon characters from that show, so that was good. And I really liked the contrasts drawn between the mirror versions of everyone and our characters--though at times the MU was sooooo horrible that it was hard to suspend belief. Our Troi (and Picard and Geordi) got to react in ways that were a lot of fun to read, though.

Diane Duane = awesome, in any case. :D

[underthewillows]

I didn't mind the space-dolphin; I rather liked having really alien (as in non-humanoid) members of Starfleet/the Federation and seeing how they interacted.

DS9 is my favourite of the new Treks, as well; Voyager was ruined for me because they couldn't seem to decide what they wanted to do - dump a crew in a completely new quadrant of the galaxy without the familiar supports of the Federation and get back to the whole "new life, new civilisations" bit, or do some hand-wavium so that it wouldn't take them sixty years to get home after all. Plus, Harry Kim - most unfairly treated ensign in Starfleet! Seriously, the stuff Tom Paris (and his manpain) got away with and ended up being promoted, while poor Harry was the textbook officer and remained "Ensign Kim" and couldn't so much as hold hands with a pretty alien without an official reprimand or it turning out the alien wanted to eat him :-)

Also, Brannon Braga and his bloody time paradoxes. Yes, yes, we get you're really clever how you can put a twist on the old time-travel story, now stop doing it eleventy-billion times, please!

I don't talk about Enterprise. The high hopes I had for that (seeing as how they got Scott Bakula in to play Archer) and then how it turned out - sorry, Vulcans are not sex-kittens (T'Pol) or toffee-nosed gits (rest of 'em) and just - blah!

DS9 was great, though.

[nenya_kanadka]

D, you make me smile. :D I had actually not seen Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap until much later than the attempt I made at watching Enterprise, and I was shocked at how much better he was in QL. Young and pretty and emoting, rather than the sort of cardboard stiffness I got off Archer. I don't know why.

I would have loved to see a show about Vulcans early in the Federation, but what I saw of T'Pol was, indeed, too much sex kitten. Of all the races to do that to!

But I haven't really watched that show, so possibly I'm not qualified to comment.

When Voyager was done well (ie, when the writing was less all over the map) it was good; one of my favourite episodes is the one where Kes leaves and Seven shows up. I say this even though I loved Kes and was upset when she left and do feel that they sometimes used Seven for male-gazey fanservice. But that first episode--Seven so terrified of being alone outside the collective, just panicking and freaking out, contrasted with how utterly centred Kes was--Kes knew who she was and where she was going, and it was a beautiful thing to see, even if it meant she was leaving people she loved. (Also: the three main characters in that episode were women: Janeway, Seven, Kes.) Generally I love Janeway, and not just because she was one of my first fictional lady-crushes. But the characters were often under-served by the writers, alas.

DS9 is my baby forever, only outclassed by B5.

[underthewillows]

Yes, the difference between Bakula in "Quantum Leap" and in "Enterprise" is such a disappointment; they got in a good actor who could act without being shouty (before I veer off on too much of a tangent, I hate the confusion that sincerity or emotion requires SHOUTING to convey that emotion rather than acting) and who wasn't going to be an action hero in the vein of Kirk (and I have nothing against Captain Kirk's command style) - and then they didn't let him act and didn't know what they wanted to do with him before they turned him into an action hero with that war arc silliness.

I'd given up on it before then, though. I had a bad feeling from the theme tune on (really, that was the worst kind of theme tune -instead of being inspiring and evocative of a newly-unified world heading out to explore space, it was more like "sit-com hijinks with bunch of 20-somethings in the big city!")

Also, that bloody beagle. I'm sorry if this comes across as animal hate, because it's not, but pets on a first-time out long-range space mission where the tech is still new and untried, living space aboard is limited, and resources have to be carefully calculated and justified for taking up room and fuel expenditure is just not on.

Kes had a built-in expiry date, but I was hoping against hope that they'd pull off some kind of "Oh, hey, life extension through technobabble or advanced alien intervention!" because come on, are we still going to keel over dead if there are more than three females at the one time as leads in a TV show? Why couldn't they kill off Neelix and keep Kes to go with Seven and B'Elanna and Janeway (and the Wildmans, both mother and daughter)?

Oh, well. One of these days!

[nenya_kanadka]

I had forgotten about the dog! It did seem very illogical to me, on an early spaceship especially.

I liked the theme song, but probably what I liked more were the opening credits with the history of ships and travel and exploration (particularly the point where you see it transitioning from our present to the obvious near-future, as the space station expands and the next-gen shuttle shows up, and then you get Cochrane's first warp ship from First Contact). It was, however, very different in tone from any other Trek credits.

I didn't even hate Neelix (I may be one of the few people who didn't!), but man, if we'd got to keep Kes I would have given him up quite happily. Somebody on Tumblr's got a bunch of screenshots put together that make it look like an AU with Captain Beverly Crusher, XO Commander Deanna Troi, and science officer Kathryn Janeway. (And notes say Dr. Ogawa as CMO.) It made me so happy. :)

[underthewillows]

Oooh, yes! With Head of Security/Tactical Lt. Cmdr. Tasha Yar, at Helm/Ops Lt. Ro Laren, Chief Engineer Lt. Cmdr. Sarah MacDougal (ably assisted by Lt. B'Elanna Torres), Botany/Life Sciences Keiko Ishikawa (either a civilian or Ensign, depends on whether the positions are all filled by Starfleet personnel or keeping the mix of civilians that TNG established), and in Sickbay (in the Dr. M'Benga role) Dr. Katherine Pulaski - also keeping the McCoy/Spock dynamic going with Pulaski/Data sparring and snarking ;-)

Only guy on the Bridge - Data. In the Janice Rand role - Ensign Geordi LaForge. In the Lt. Kyle role - Myles O'Brien.

Why not? See how having a predominantly female main cast is an unthinkable dream, but having a predominantly male cast with three (maximum) females is the norm, and if we get a new female in, one of the original females has to go (Crusher for Pulaski, Yar for Worf - and swapping out an original female for a fan-favourite male from the predecessor series annoyed me, even though I like Worf, Kes for Seven)!

That's what annoyed me most about the Reboot Trek - whole new timeline, they even BLOW UP VULCAN (I have a strong opinion on this, as you may guess) and they - cut DOWN the number of female crew to Uhura because, psht! keeping track of all them wimmin in the original series was so confusing, I suppose.

Would it have killed them to make Pavel Chekov Polina Chekova, a cute little Russian girl genius? Or give us Lts. Chapel and Rand? If they could BLOW UP VULCAN AND KILL SPOCK'S MOTHER, it would have been a doddle to have more than ONE female on the Bridge.

This should be obligatory research for future screenwriters.

And if that doesn't work, send Mirror!Verse Uhura (who is OUR 'verse Uhura being badass all over the Mirrorverse) after 'em.

:-)

[underthewillows]

Hm - looks like link failure in the above comment.

Women of Star Trek (the Original Series): http://allyourtrekarebelongto.us/toswomen.htm

Uhura being awesome and distracting Evil Security Sulu so he won't notice the flashing light indicating the shenanigans going on with the transporter to get them home from the Mirrorverse (long explanation is longer than clip): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CJdFppsHeo

[nenya_kanadka]

I have hearts in my eyes at this concept. :D It would be so lovely!

I hear that Carol Marcus is getting some screentime in the next reboot movie, and Gaila was a fun addition (when she got to be Uhura's friend and a Starfleet officer, not just a sex partner for Jim), but why couldn't we have them AND Chapel AND Rand? I'm reading a lovely novel now that stars Sulu and Kor/Kang/Koloth and Curzon Dax, but what sticks out to me is that both Rand and Chapel get full roles as doctors and Starfleet commanders. It's great to see them get their due. <3

Also: BLEW UP VULCAN. HOW DOES THAT EVEN--- *goes away spluttering, not having stopped since the film came out in 2009* HOW CAN YOU DO THAT, IT'S FRIGGING VULCAN

Aggrieved Vulcan fan is aggrieved

[underthewillows]

I know! BLEW UP VULCAN - A DEED THAT WILL STAIN THE 21st CENTURY IN THE ANNALS OF HISTORY AND LIVE ON IN INFAMY FOREVER!

Not alone that, they KILLED SPOCK'S MOTHER, THE AWESOME LADY AMANDA! Because, y'know, too many wimmins in the first film I suppose.

Grrr. I hope T'Pau survived (I'm betting you couldn't kill off that tough old bird with a supernova, never mind a piddling little planetary explosion) and we get to see her.

But yeah - Carol Marcus, a character best known not for her work as a scientist but as the mother of Kirk's son (who lasts all of ten minutes, poor lad). If the Reboot has her primarily as Nu!Kirk's love interest, great anger will descend upon their heads as I pour out the vials of my fannish Trekkie wrath.

Well, we'll see how the second movie turns out. I'll lay aside the tar and feathers for the moment :-)

Re: Aggrieved Vulcan fan is aggrieved

[nenya_kanadka]

You speak for me, you do indeed. <3 I actually conveniently forget about Amanda Greyson and Vulcan when I'm thinking of the reboot, most of the time: otherwise I'd just be standing there going, "But, but, but you can't DO THAT" the whole time.

I mean...would you blow up Cardassia Prime, Bajor, Andor, Betazed, the Bolian homeworld, Trill, Romulus, Q'onos? Certainly various devastations have happened to those planets (notably during the Dominion War), but make it go bye-bye forever? No, no you would not. If you were writing Star Trek and giving a shit about the bones of the universe. And Vulcan! Vulcan is the Federation, to me, aside from Earth. Yes, lots of more people joined later and all, but what is the iconic image of Star Trek to the masses? Spock and his Vulcan salute, that's what. YOU CAN'T BLOW UP VULCAN

(Though my beloved and otherwise smart girlfriend disagrees. I dunno, man. I realize it's a reboot, but...Vulcan?!)

Re: Aggrieved Vulcan fan is aggrieved

[underthewillows]

Four original founding members of the Federation: Terra, Vulcan, Andor and Tellar. It's like deciding to start your American movie for Americans about America with somebody burning the Declaration of Independence and stamping the ashes into the ground, and from then on, sorry, no more revered historic founding document exists in this continuity.

Again, yes, it's a reboot, they want to show "Anything can happen! This is a completely new universe!" but still - a step too far.

Hmmm - beautiful, smart, is okay with the destruction of Vulcan - are you absolutely certain she's not an undercover Romulan agent? Try casually dropping random comments about the Tal Shiar in conversation and see how she reacts :-)

Re: Aggrieved Vulcan fan is aggrieved

[nenya_kanadka]

Terra, Vulcan, Andor and Tellar

Ooh, see, I knew it must have been more than just Earth and Vulcan that started the Federation, but I couldn't remember who the other couple were. Andor was a favourite speculation though.

Hmmm - beautiful, smart, is okay with the destruction of Vulcan - are you absolutely certain she's not an undercover Romulan agent?

I'm chortling into my tea here, because (upon her recent rewatch of a number of TNG episodes) we have concluded that there ARE no Romulans: the entire species is made up of other people in disguise. (Including Deanna Troi. And a number of energy beings. And Vulcans. And...)

Re: Aggrieved Vulcan fan is aggrieved

[underthewillows]

we have concluded that there ARE no Romulans

Yeah, that's just what an infiltrating agent of a hostile alien species would WANT us to think.

I dunno; are you sure YOU'RE not a sleeper Romulan deep-cover agent yourself?

Re: Aggrieved Vulcan fan is aggrieved

[nenya_kanadka]

Psh, I'm a natural redhead.

Re: Aggrieved Vulcan fan is aggrieved

[sentienceimmutable]

Ha ha ha--how did I even miss this thread the first time round? I have expounded at great length to all willing (and many unwilling) on my love for all things Vulcan and my burning hatred of the reboot. I knew there was a reason us lot got along. I knew it.

Re: Aggrieved Vulcan fan is aggrieved

[nenya_kanadka]

You are, as my aunt would say, a perspicacious individual. <3 :D

[nenya_kanadka]

"LWAXANA!!!! :D" is certainly a completely legit takeaway from TNG, I admit. :D Baby Riker is just...wrong without his beard, man. It gets a little better later on, but I hear you about the earlier episodes. Though I'm currently watching a lot of it with Mucca and being surprised at it being better than I'd remembered.

DS9 (and B5) knocks it out of the water though, for me. AND has Lwaxana! <3