Any World (That I'm Welcome To)

First up, Google Ocean: Has Atlantis Been Found Off Africa? Slightly misleading, since it's not so much "Wow, we found a former city/island in roughly the right place!" as "Hm, we found some oddly regular lines on the ocean floor which might be of human origin, and therefore might have been a settlement of some sort at one time, and might be about where Plato said...maybe." But as one guy quoted in the article said, even if it's a natural formation, it's odd enough to merit investigation.

Next, a review of the novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey here. Actually, two reviews, because the reviewer really likes some aspects and others, not at all. Apparently the book features a bunch of AUs, essentially? Including Golem!Achilles and Werewolf!Penelope? It could hardly be boring, at least.

I'll take this opportunity to recommend Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, which is narrated by Penelope-the-shade a couple millennia after her death and offers a much different reading of Odysseus's character. At least, it's mostly narrated by Penelope. There are also interludes from the chorus, composed of the shades of the twelve maids Odysseus hanged, and in their opinion, even Penelope's version is leaving a few things out, or is just outright lies...

Babylon 3 1/2 reviews the show season by season, complete with best/worst episode choices. Besides noting what everyone else did, that Season 5 was a complete mess because they couldn't compensate for the network's meddling, it also points out some of the things where maybe they did have the opportunity to make it a better season and didn't. I'm particularly fond of the comment, "All cool, but the chaos of the Drakh war happens after the end of the season, in fucking spin-off novels. Garibaldi and Lyta establish a conspiracy to overthrow the Psi-Corps, enabling Lyta to free her people and Garibaldi to finally get revenge on Bester - all cool, but all that happens after the end of the season, in FUCKING SPIN-OFF NOVELS [...] Bester's downfall - let's say it once more for emphasis - only happens in a FUCKING SPIN-OFF NOVEL." Because this is one of my beefs with the Star Wars prequels, too - there's some sort of plot involving Syfo Dyas, dead or alive, but despite the fact that finding out whether he really did order the clones (and why) or whether Dooku stole his identity would be awfully nice to know, you can't find out except in, as Dan says, FUCKING SPIN-OFF NOVELS. If you're going to make a movie, spin-offs are great, but you also shouldn't expect the audience to go track down extra sources in a different medium just to fill in the plot holes and glaring omissions. (Like, say, does Anakin have any reaction to leading brainwashed troops who we're led to believe can't choose not to fight, given that he used to be a slave? Might that have something to do with why from his point of view, the Jedi are evil? Just a bit?)

There's also some analysis of Sheridan, continued in the comments, including whether he should be considered a war criminal for that stunt with using unwitting, unconscious telepaths as suicide bombers. (And as someone points out, if they can smuggle entire people onto the ships, why can't they just smuggle regular old bombs?) I'm also not the only person who's uneasy about the top-secret paramilitary Ranger organization loyal only to their leader.

Finally, it's fun to go back and re-read this batch of Harry Potter essays written post-Goblet of Fire. Ah, the good old days when we thought that Harry deciding not to murder Pettigrew (or let anyone else do so) meant that whatever trials he suffered, he would not stoop to using a torture curse on someone for spitting.

I've been meaning to do this post for a while. I think I might have put it off because seeing the end of two series (Harry Potter and Babylon 5) in a few months was a bit of a downer - not to mention something that involves a lot of thinking about two huge canons!

But anyway, reflections about the last three episodes

And just think, BSG is ending next year, so I'll have to go through all of this again. Maybe I should stick to movies and stand-alone books - series build up too many expectations they usually can't fulfill!

baleanoptera did this, and I wanted to try it.

Five reasons I love the things I do (in no particular order):

( Star Wars )

( B5 )

( BSG )

( Firefly )

A lot of recurring elements there, especially Messy Universe and The Living Past. I'd list more shows/movies/books (like Harry Potter and Rome, but this is pretty long already.

Here's hoping Allegra and FloNase will help, since Claritin, Alavert, and Chlortrimeton didn't. I think I feel more alert than I have in weeks, which is a good sign. Now if only the post-nasal drip would let up...

So to focus on more cheery topics - that "one moment of beauty" just over halfway through Season 2 of B5? Puer natus est! I had to learn that in chorus once, and I think we listened to that very recording! It always feels good to recognize the random cultural references in TV shows. (Or is it random? Maybe a Gregorian chant about the birth of Christ intended for Christmas services is relevant in some way I haven't realized yet.) Also, the Ministry of Peace, aka MiniPax? The B5 crew are obviously not up on their 20th-century lit, or they'd be more wary.

I've also started watching Buffy, which I sadly missed the first time around (am now on S2), and have already gotten gotten two great laughs out of spotting Hamlet quotes. The Master's "Where are your jibes now?" puts a line originally addressed to a skull in the mouth of someone trying to turn Buffy into a skull (well, trying to kill her, anyway), and Giles's "The rest is silence" in response to Buffy turning off her music as a guy dies outside also had me giggling.

While watching Season 1 of Babylon 5 for the first time, I've been comparing it to Battlestar Galactica, my other recent TV fannish obsession. There's a lot I could go into, but one of the things that fascinates me right now is each show's Labor Strike episode. (And not just because both have thematically relevant titles which can apply to all the parties involved in the strikes, although I love that too.)

Many of the elements of these episodes are similar: the workers don't get enough (or any) pay or downtime, the equipment is wearing out and injuring people, the sympathetic authority figures won't help the strikers without promises that they'll go back to work first, someone in authority threatens to start arresting or shooting the strikers, etc.

But I found the BSG strike episode unconvincing and disconnected from the rest of the show, and the B5 strike episode convincing and a natural result of previous events. This seemed completely wrong when I tried listing the reasons why that was so. The B5 episode has a melodramatic villain who is apparently not only unable to listen to the other side at all, but completely unhinged. (Maybe it's because of his strange tendency to enunciate every word so clearly that his eyes bug out and you can see all his teeth.) Also, the B5 labor leader looks too fragile to have ever worked on the loading docks. The BSG strike episode, on the other hand, did not have a cardboard Evil Government Man appearing out of nowhere, but characters I knew. It had workers whose hands actually got dirty from their jobs. Finally, when I went back and counted instances where we saw workers supporting the fleet in BSG, I found a lot more than what I've seen in B5 so far. So why did the B5 strike episode work so much better than the BSG strike episode for me?

( I think it has to do with how well these elements are integrated into the rest of the show. )

In short, continuity rocks.