Photos!

January 31, 2007 · Posted in General · 5 Comments 

Yay, my camera arrived! Here are some photos. Photos containing humans are only visible to friends and family. If you are friends or family, join Flickr and I will friend you.

Tags: no tags

Party!

January 23, 2007 · Posted in General · Comment 

And now I am 5².

For my birthday I got: a camera (theoretically), comics (an issue of Usagi Yojimbo, Digger Vol. 1 and Manimatron), a Hero fountain pen + ink, a lampshade, a pro flickr account, a bag of nuts (hur hur hur), bath salts, OR- and AND-goats and a bottle of red wine. I hope I'm not forgetting anything.

ETA: Jo made the birthday cake. Yum! Also, book vouchers from my parents; hooray!

Here are some photos, courtesy of Neil.

Lost & found: somebody left a fuzzy blueish-greyish zip-up polar fleecy top behind. From Woolworths; XL. Photographic evidence implicates d@vid.

Tags: no tags

Full Fandom Circle

January 17, 2007 · Posted in Reviews · 1 Comment 

I have the fifth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The video quality is awful, it's full of 90's cheese, there are patches of extremely dodgy acting, the aliens are silly, the costumes are pastel, the planets have suspiciously uniform climates and look like the Karoo, the science is laughably bad, Deanna Troi still has the plunging neckline, at least one episode so far has been awful, Wesley Crusher has just returned, and it's all absolutely wonderful and I can't wait to watch the next episode. Oh, Captain Picard, how I have missed you!

I loved TNG before I loved any other TV series, book or comic. I saw some of the first season in SA, several years after it had been produced (apparently in 1987, when I was five and lived in Poland). I was hooked instantly. When Deep Space Nine came out later I thought it was even better, and it has remained my favourite Trek — it got me into the internet, back in 1996 when it was a new and exciting fad that I had heard about in school — and I'd love to get hold of some of that, but TNG still holds a special place in my heart. (I've never seen any of the original series, except for the later movies. Let's not talk about Voyager or Enterprise.)

The thing is, although I love both TNG and DS9, I haven't actually watched much of either series, because SABC cancelled DS9 after the second or third season, or something (and I think did the same with TNG). Most of my fan activity to date has consisted of reading episode summaries, reviews, newsgroup discussions and fanfiction, and using them to piece together what was happening. And this was in the Dark Ages before Wikipedia and Google, when Google Groups was still Deja News, so you can imagine the detective work required in some cases. Thus, although I have extensive background knowledge about these episodes and the characters who appear in them (although I've had to refresh my memory on occasion), this is the first time that I am seeing them.

I'm glad that some treasured childhood memories don't turn out to suck when you revisit them. The things that I like most about Star Trek — the alien politics; the ensemble cast of interesting characters; and the actors who are taking it seriously in spite of the latex, spandex and technobabble — are still there, just as I remembered them. So far, I haven't been disappointed.

:D DDDD

Tags: no tags