every night after dark in a dreamy, delirious fight

[freckles_and_doubt]

Well, that was pretty awful. The older I get, the worse I handle late nights (and, it has to be said, the Demon Drink). Becoming horizontal at about 11pm after a particularly vociferous closing session to Neil's game (we won!), I thereafter spent several frustrating hours pursuing a small, blinking, bi-coloured light around the walls of my room at about head-height. Then, as hypnagogic hallucination gave way to actual dream, I sat through a dreary and interminable faculty selection committee where, despite the fact that I was actually one of the candidates, I had to watch all the rest being interviewed. No-one on the committee would explain why this was necessary, merely looking knowing and making off-hand remarks about how the candidates weren't actually the candidates, anyway. In the middle of it all the Dean's secretary, prompted by an incomprehensible crisis of some sort and acting on a direct instruction from the Dean, hustled me off to catch a plane to Bombay. I still don't know why. I am, however, once more a little frayed.

In an effort to inject some slightly more positive energy into the day, herewith a list of Things I Have Recently Enjoyed.

• The new Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals. I spent Monday evening ensconced on the sofa with the Hobbit, chortling at intervals. Terry Pratchett is still very much Terry Pratchett, although I found the book a little scattered and over-busy in its themes and sub-plots: I suspect we're seeing actually a very good writer coming up against the slightly over-simplified limitations of his genre, and being driven to complicate them. The result is a bit cluttered, but the characters are as always warmly human, the digs at both football and academia are very happy-making, and the issues being explored (prejudice, mostly) are real and sharply pointed.
  
• Supernatural. About halfway through the first season: I am somewhat charmed by this series even though its monster-of-the-weekishness is not the only thing it's ripped off from the X-Files. (I swear you could do a direct episode correlation chart). Like the X-Files, it works because of the dynamic between its central characters, who are rather nicely-drawn brothers with a fairly realistic array of tensions, affections and differences. Also, extended road-trip. The actual working-out of the Supernatural Dingus Du Jour is not about reality at all, and I get a bit miffed about lack of consequences such as arrest, but it's a reasonably endearing watch.
  
• Buffy Season 9, i.e. the comics. Joss lets loose without budget constraints, leading to Giant!Dawn, Fray crossovers and whole episodes inside someone's supernatural head. I'm finding the artwork a bit variable - love some versions of the characters, hate others - but the plots are interesting and compelling, and it's a lot of fun to watch the characters develop post-Sunnydale. Buffy is considerably less annoying, too.
  
• smoczek's fajitas. Yum.

Comments

[pumeza.livejournal.com]

Oh, yum -- good news re Season 9. I am currently three episodes away from the end of Season 7 and it is, to be honest, beginning to seem a bit of a chore. Must be done, but there are no mad impulses to watch multiple episodes in a row. Even watching Nathan Fillion being Bad isn't all that much fun, and Spike has gone all mushy. Buffy overload?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Season 7 gets all dark and emo, and can be a bit much after a while; Buffy, in particular, handles her slayette-gang so totally and utterly ineptly that you want to slap her silly and take over. I do love the season finale, though. Satisfyingly epic, with interesting feminist wossnames. And a lovely Spike-heroism moment.

Much of the chore of the season and over-emofication of Spike is, to me, redeemed by Principal Wood, who's rather beautiful and who effectively spanks Faith as she badly needs to be spanked :>.

[(Anonymous)]

Supernatural moves away from the monster-of-the-week storyline in favor of extended arcs by the beginning of Season 2, IIRC. They'll still toss in a monster-of-the-week for flavor, and even better, the funny episodes get funnier. (Last season went a little too dark for me, but it did have the effect of making the funnier episodes pop even more.)

Cheers, Dayle