sundries

[rm]

Currently, we are waiting for our next Buffy and Angel box sets to arrive. I believe Patty expects them today.

Plans! Are coming together. I have generalized knowledge now of when Patty will be visiting her family in Ohio (yay, she won't miss Pride, yay) and What to Expect at the Conference is becoming more clear. I've given up worry; it's all constructed paranoia anyway.

Yesterday James Moran tweeted something funny and bitter about enjoying the exciting news before the Internet came and ruined it all, and I told him the Internet was very, very happy and then he tweeted back at me about his dinner, and that was all lovely. And then, of course, by the time it was dinner time here, someone was wrong on the Internet. Which, in fact, doesn't mean anyone was wrong at all, just that conversations had started to be like that. Oh, non-canceled TV show fandoms you are hard, hard on my heard.

For me, I'm grateful for an S4, because my brain instinctively finds a way to explain shit the show doesn't/won't. Will we see a grieving process from Jack about Ianto and Stephen? Well, lord knows how many years it will have been for him, so what we're graced with will likely be very small. However, seeing him go on is such a better feeling (I think! remember how I said Day 5 couldn't hurt worse than Day 4?) than Ianto's death being the end of the particular fictional world that's Torchwood.

Also, damn I'm glad to know what's going on with the show before I tackle the chapter proposal I'm doing. The upcoming season of unknownness has some meta awesome to it for that.

Anyway. Torchwood. We all feel stuff and in many cases bring a lot of random expertises and inside information to the rumour table. I'm going to try not to play Someone Is Wrong on the Internet, because, of course, that someone might well be me.

I am reading the Doctor Who book with the Neanderthal in it.

I have started another kink_bingo fic, but with a lot of work on my plate, WIAD, and the fact that more than any of that I want some quality Patty time especially now that ti's not too hot to think out, you get to wait for a while.

On the subject of classical education.

Lost WWII battlefield found.

Other links of newsy interest as I find them.

Comments

[azn-jack-fiend.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness, I'm starting the very same book!

I read The Stealers of Dreams and thought it was decent, although the scenes at the end kind of fell flat. Then I started on The Deviant Strain, but it began in exactly the same way as the inferior Torchwood novels -- dull, grinding style, a minor character I have no reason to care about dies horribly in order to get the plot into motion -- so I switched over to Only Human.

So far, I'm enjoying the style of Only Human. Plus, it's packed full of fun Jack innuendo.

I posted exuberantly about S4 TWICE yesterday, I just couldn't help myself, it's such good news.

[svollga.livejournal.com]

I liked Only Human a lot, though out of the three books about Tardis-a-trois, I like The Stealers of Dreams the most (which might be because it has some of my plot kinks in it).
The Deviant Strain is... well. Not good. Also, I'm Russian, so it's twice as 'not good' for me.

[azn-jack-fiend.livejournal.com]

Yikes. Hearing that, I'm especially reluctant to go back to The Deviant Strain. I hate Russian stereotypes. The cardboard Russian villains were the only part of the TW novel Trace Memory I didn't like... they almost ruined an otherwise excellent book for me.

The plot for Stealers of Dreams was pretty good! In the beginning, it felt a LOT like a satire by James Morrow called "City of Truth". I wouldn't be surprised if the idea was based on that. But the premise departs about halfway through, and I didn't see some of the twists coming.

[svollga.livejournal.com]

Re: The Deviant Strain: Oh yeah, Russian stereotypes.
It wasn't even that they got whatever they wrote about wrong - it's that every time Russia\former Soviet Union appears in any Western book/film, it's either villains or some other ugliness and danger. Sometimes I want to ask the authors if they know that Russia is a more-or-less modern state with electricity and computers and normal people who have normal jobs? That it's not only mobs or totalitarian ugliness or bears in the streets? Really.
I haven't read Trace Mamory because when I was looking through it in the shop, I saw it has Russian villains and decided against buying it.

I haven't read "City of Truth", but I liked the kind of anti-utopia they created in the book, and how it was all explained. Also, in that book, every one of three characters had something to do! In The Deviant Strain, Jack is mostly running around having a guilty conscience. (Or so it felt at the moment. I've read all three books quite a while ago.)