emonquente- Followmy.tv

@Artifex You know though (weird comment a year later but bear with me) -- I am STILL annoyed that the artifact thing just kinda. .. disappeared. I mean, the hell man? It was the point of the show, and they kinda just forgot about it. I know, time-travel and all but. . . .that thing was SO friggin' cool! I still wanna know how that story arc would have played out . . . I mean, I liked what came after and all, but I still think that story-line was ultimately better.

Plus, the post-matrix episodes were kinda forced into some painful scenes due to obvious character reactions to such a traumatic experience.

Man, why the hell do I think to say this now anyway? Weird. . ..

@emonquente Agreed, was a good show. One of syfys better ones.

Re-watching eureka and playing FF VII now -- whee times.

Seriously, most shows, the first few episodes (or seasons) just don't hold up later, especially compared to the quality the show itself reached -- but this one totally does. Hooked again from the first episode. I can rarely say that.

@Baltimore Ueberhaubpt nichts. Too bloody weird :P

Nah, but really, just not my scene. Photos, gifs, memes, they aren't the way my brain works -- it's just noise to me, I can't process it properly. I suppose I could learn, we're a species quite adept at that, but there's not much I could get out of it -- I like to keep a lot of my love to myself, fanatacism isn't really my thing either.

I watch too many shows, play too many games, and so on to be fanatic about anything these days. Though there was definitely a time when I did obsess over things. I also had much less free time to discover new things back then, which I think was part of it.

I have an (involuntary) exorbitant amount of free-time though -- so I do move on, rarely do anything twice. Doctor Who being the only consistent exception to the rule -- and event hen I just tend to re-watch the 9th doctor's season once every few months, just takes up one of my days off an' all.

Hey friend,
ha ha, yes, tumblr is bloody weird, that's what I like about it. It's perfect for a lot of things, in this case, you've found my fanblog. I am a little ashamed of it, but obviously not enough to keep it a secret. I had to put it into my signature, ha ha ;) I don't remember geocities and angelfire, I guess, I haven't been mixing TV with the internet back then, I was more like the roleplaying kind of girl. (Legend of the green dragon and stuff.)

I am glad you started talking to me, you're right, we've been on each others list for quite a time ;) So, fancy to check out tumblr or is it too weird for you? *laughs*

I've been posting too much to keep with not having a bloody profile foto so. .. ta-da. ha ha

@oranges gonna give it a try -- hope the "why" behind it isn't the quite obvious (and frankly, genius, in an evil sort of way) sociological vs. psychological vs. genetic experiment. Not that I'm not interested in the answer to such an experiment, but I have my suspicions about the answers someone might try to feed me in lieu of the actual studies (because, let's be frank, they are definitely not on the good side of morality).

Hnnn. . . actually. . . suspicions aside, I think I can go into this with an open mind -- I just caught myself being very interested in even that outcome. So bring it on. Ha ha.

I'll update when I've caught up.

@emonquente I just found Orphan Black, and am catching up with that. Good show IMO.

Grr - there's nothing on!

@oranges I treat Warehouse 13 as pure magic -- the psychic and spiritual power of artifcts' owners. New Who I treat much like Str Wars -- there's only so many times they can make the damned sonic a magic wand before I just pretend it literally is one.

Besides, in the case of Doctor Who I keep turning to it purely for the doctor, everything else is incidental.

In short, there can be things I dislike about a show without disliking the show itself.

But you are very right about genres. Ever tried sorting your DVD collection by genre? Of my 900 or so before I sold them last fall I had about 150 in "misc" and dozens sorted by actor instead of anythign else -- my Depp collection, DeCaprio, or Cage. Plenty more. lol

@emonquente In short: Fair enough.

I am confused because you still watch new who and warehouse 13. I couldn't get into that because it was a bit too magic, IIRC. Considering you like those shows, can you really say you don't like scifi? Perhaps it is more specific.

Genre labels are annoying, especially fantasy and scifi because they're so broad and not exclusive. Fantasy is like the regular usage of the word (no magic required). It's about how it's written more than what is written. Scifi seems to mean 'stuff that doesnt exist'.
The more accurate, obscure genres are rarely used. I think I would call Firefly scifi, western, fantasy. Lots of westerns have elements of fantasy. Oh no you didnt just piss off clint eastwood, well pew pew buddy. I suppose you can only ask for so much in a shorthand label.

EDIT: https://www.goodreads.com/genres/list has a summary per genre, and seems to be as good a definitive source as any.

@oranges

See, you've made the statement about individual people, not the conglomerate town. A person is rational, at least a bit smart in most cases, generally pretty reasonable to get on with and so on -- people on the other hand are the absolute worst qualities of each individual person, magnified to about a thousand fold for each group of 100.

In short, I stand by my hatred of the town for being a mess, for being a place that repeatedly screwed me over and a lot more besides. I can't say it isn't personal, nor that it is even rational -- but the hatred of that town gets expressed then in the worst qualities of the constituent cliques.

For an individual, non of those things are a problem. I myself am indeed queer in most ways you can mean the word, and at least a couple versions of hipster as well. I'm not any better in my faults than anyone else.

Anyway, I'm not so much trying to stand by the statement here as explain why it was said. Really, it is rather hard to stand by anything that I say -- it's just so damned hard to say something that actually is what you mean, with all possible loop-holes and generalizations eliminated. I can only think of a couple phrases I can say that are actually true both the way I mean them and all possible ways someone could interpret them. Of course, that's a topic rather unrelated here and sounds like an excuse rather than me just changing the topic so perhaps I oughtn't have brought it up.

Anyhow, I'm rambling, so. . .

cheers.

@oranges The original Doctor Who, believe it or not was actually educational, and the science in it was very well thought out. It had some serious flaws of course, but honestly the biggest ones were due to the science at the time being wrong, not the show (as an example, they once said Saturn had the wrong number of moons, because they were the only ones spotted to that point).

New Who is indefensibly magic, and I hate that about the show -- it makes it so hard to enjoy it sometimes to be honest, and I think the absolute worst of it is when it is indensibly magic and yet they give 'explainers' anyway. Don't give explainer lines if they are even less sensical than whatever on-the-fly presumptions your audience may make for themselves.

I take the science part of sci-fi seriously, and what most everyone considers sci-fi I write off as bad future-fantasy -- nothing to do with science at all.

Honestly, the thing I would call the best science fiction on television lately? House --- it extrapolated just a little bit further than what we've really got, actually did the research on what symptoms were what diseases, and used the intuition of the lead character and the Fiction Essential to excuse that the answer is never the solution that would be checked for in real life (even if that pursuit would lead to a person's death, as it actually does in real life). They took one key liberty to the series and capitilized that and that alone (for the most part).

Also, to be honest, even if the lines were delivered less...bad... and the science didn't bug me -- I don't like westerns of any kind -- not even ones set in space.

And no, I'm not being impartial, one of the few things I've learned in life is that I can't be, so why pretend otherwise.

I guess the thrust of this whole argument is what I said earlier -- when you get right down to it I just don't like sci-fi itself.

And what's wrong with being a queer, eco-freak, hipster, frat guy? I have to say I get the impression from your writing that you're a bit peculiar yourself. I hope I don't offend, but I would actually pick you as more bendy than straight. You say people figuring themselves out, which is totally a good thing, but you preceded it with 'worst kind'. Pretty uncool.

@emonquente
Hi :)

Are you sure you're judging Firefly impartially? It doesn't sound like you are, because if you did, you'd love it. But that's me, not being at-all impartial. ^_

I get that it's probably more of a normal emotional aversion on your part, but I disagree with a point you brought up, and this is the internet.

(thus)

Magic isn't necessarily a bad thing in stories. Banging gauges, machines, and monitors until they work and then banging them more until they say the right thing is: charming, funny, and probably necessary in most tv series. Not a long of time can go to background/world details. Inventing more legitimate solutions for plot points would take too long to write, and still not be scientific. To get to a level of writing where you could say it makes sense in a universe with slightly changed physics might involve planning from the start and/or not much room to maneuver fun plot points in.
Few fantasy books have well thought out magic systems. I can only assume it's hard work. Or maybe it's just really not very fun for writers. Filling in that sort of background world knowledge in a tv series simply isn't very practical, at any rate.

If you want spaceships and such, in any story medium, there (pretty much?) needs to be magic, or some jiggling of actual-physics involved. I'm sure there's some scifi with pretty legit science (the recent novel Nexus comes to mind), but mostly I think it's pretty magic. It's part of the package, and a lot of people buy the package because of it. You ought to accept it to enjoy sci-fi.

You love Doctor Who? That's indefensibly magic and very good. Sherlock isn't hole-proof either; in general Sherlock clearly jumps to too many conclusions to be so accurate. There's a necessary 'believability threshhold' for all fiction really, and I think one should be consistent in their critiquing.

By the way:
I you do love Doctor Who, I think you would enjoy Firefly, if you havn't given it a real shot.