if you want to say hello (or something less pleasant) get thee to the messageboard.

if i wrote fanfic, i would be totally inspired to write Babylon 5/Scarecrow and Mrs. King crossover right now. (Lee has a recurring series of vivid dreams about being a hero on a giant space station in the distant future. his obsession is starting to affect his job performance, and Amanda is questioning his sanity. meanwhile, on a space station orbiting...) but i don't write fanfic. just saying.

thanks, bhagwanx. i'm going to be thinking about it all day.

i watched Lost Tales: Voices in the Dark so you don't have to.



*shudders*



fortunately, the ill effect was somewhat dulled by dinner, cupcakes, and company. i feel like we need to get some sage for markbourne and E's tv room.

i lose at year-in-review.

one of the things i did do in 2006 was consume epic-scale entertainment. i watched all of Babylon 5, i read the entire Baroque Cycle back to back, and almost all of the Aubrey-Maturin series (finished Blue at the Mizzen this morning, so it doesn't quite count.)

don't know if there's meaning in that.

all the media i consume seems to be sending me the same messages. i'm working on watching the fifth season of b5. i finished Red Lightning last night. i tried listening to portable radio on the bus for the first time this morning, just in time for the terrorist plot news.

Red Lightning includes a sequence of future Homeland Security screening that involves being separated by gender and stripped naked, and getting your clothes and belongings back wrapped in plastic. handing over belongings and casing things in plastic was the order of the day today in airports across the US and Britain. for anyone familiar with SeaTac, the security lines this morning ran all the way across the skybridge and into the parking garage. (the book was a total disappointment, BTW. it's full of interesting ideas, but lacks focus. there's nothing to replace the energy and verve of the first book, and the commentary on natural disasters and Where America's Going doesn't live up to a Heinlein comparison. there were at least three possible novels in there and none of them got written. bummer.) the thought of making a transatlantic flight without a book to read makes my skin crawl.

if i understand correctly, the people who were arrested were caught via policework and some cooperation from the government of Pakistan, not because they were picked up in a security screening. yay for talented cops, boo for shutting the barn door after the horse is gone. i would lay money on the "red alert" staying in place until the elections are over here. it's bothering me that the news coverage sounds so much like ISN...during the war. i want my skepticism to be misplaced, and i'm glad that something appears to be working (unlike, say, randomly invading Iraq.) it would help if Bush and Blair weren't such nasty liars.

i'm also finishing up The Long Tail, which is meant to be economic, but i think is a full-blown cultural force, where we are running out of common experiences and reasons to engage with people unlike ourselves. what binds people into a nation without some baseline? tangentially, i had a conversation recently about breaking the news of 9/11/01 to small children (and how my friend had done it slowly); i would have had to talk about it right away since C and i did a lot of crying while listening to NPR. (i especially remember the stories of volunteers hiding in the rubble for the rescue dogs to find at the end of the day so that the animals didn't go crazy because they'd failed. choking sobs and lots of ropy snot...) it caused me to wonder if people who didn't know New York or New Yorkers experienced the same emotional hit. it's a definite shared experience but i'm not sure that it was the common one that i thought it was.

i love commentary tracks on DVDs. i like to gather factoids about the production, about how movies and tv work, and about the creative process. i like craft; it's a whole other layer of entertainment for me. i've been working through Babylon 5 in order (i've seen fistfuls of episodes, but not the full story arc) and i'm partway through season two. this set of packaging sends you to the special features when you have completed viewing the last episode of the disc. so i decided to rewatch one with JMS commenting. which is quite good, since he's the creative force, but i just had to turn the damn thing off. he's telling plot spoilers not just from later in the season, but from later in the series. i suppose i shouldn't expect to be protected from 10 year old pop culture, but damn. no more special features for me until i'm done. sigh.