Farscape 1x01-1x13 (no spoilers)

Found this on hesychasm's LJ, which greatly reassures me (warning, spoilers for first half S1 Farscape in there). I've been watching Farscape in an almost religious manner -- I do it because I desperately want to get into another show and because I've heard so many assurances online that it's a Good Show. Except nothing really has sparked in me yet. So after making my way through half of S1 with the boy, I finally caved and watched the first two episodes of S4 Buffy (which I loved, btw. And to my surprise, I like Riley right now. He's cute and funny and geeky). The funny thing was that the boy actually sounded quite relieved and extremely happy to turn back to Buffy.

Now I feel reassured again that the show will get better. Good. I got myself a little spoiled, but that was good or else I might have just quit the show or something. That's the only thing that got me through all of S1 -- I knew there would be some character development that would become full-fledged only later on. Hey, I have great fondness for Angel S1 (AI family!), but some of the individual episodes... er. If I hadn't known To Shanshu in LA was coming up, I probably would have ended up bailing.

Back to FS: the problem is, a lot of the show seems very cheesy to me right now. Stereotyped characters (D'Argo the warrior, John the clueless, Zhaan the helpful priestess), no central arc (Zhaan goes evil! No wait, she's better! The crew would kill each other just so they can get home! They all support each other!), and some very cliched sci-fi ideas so far. Yet, there are still some things that do interest me. I love Aeryn, totally and completely. I love her thorniness when she thinks about her home, I love the way she thinks Crichton is scum, I love her complete cluelessness about anything resembling human emotion. And I love watching her learn about them -- The Flax, for example, was a really boring episode until the very end, when Aeryn makes a very un-Aeryn-like decision to save Crichton because she doesn't want to die alone. Most interesting moments (to me) consist of Aeryn or Aeryn and Crichton completely not getting each other. I also like Crichton's cluelessness and his puppy-dog eagerness to have everyone in the crew get along. I also enjoy the tension among the crew -- they all don't trust each other, which is an interesting comparison to the little Star Trek I've seen. I also love Rygel because he's annoying and selfish and I can't always tell what he's going to do next.

So still sticking with it... and I think I'm only a few episodes away from the really good stuff. Exxxceellent....

Hrm

NY Times article on blogging and how it affects your personal circle.

I find this interesting because everyone I knew of who had a blog has by now moved on to LJ. I wonder if everyone's going to be on LJ two years from now after the fandom community has gone into something else entirely. I also find it interesting that lots of people are just now figuring out the etiquette of online behavior and etc. One reason I adore LJ is the custom filters. The boy said he doesn't quite get why people would want to put intimate details of their lives online for strangers to read at all. I guess it's a kind of strange habit unless one is used to the idea of meeting people and learning about them online, as opposed to IRL. Wouldn't it be interesting if fandom were the pioneer of the "new internet culture" or whatever, when the large majority of the people start figuring out what can be done with the internet?

So the article had me wondering on things like: how do I draw the line between my LJ-life and RL? I mean, is a public journal/blog an oxymoron? I know I definitely write about many more things in my LJ than I did/do in my text journal, because the text journal is mainly there for things I desperately need to get out of my system and don't have anyone to tell it to. And I've found as I grow older and find more people to trust, I write in my journal less and less because there are fewer and fewer things that I can't say to anyone. And now, with LJ, all the things that I usually don't tell my RL friends for fear of being thought of as crazy (i.e. Buffy, television, some political ranting, randomn thoughts on food and books) go here too. I guess what I find especially interesting is the clash of public and private in LJ -- sometimes I write stuff that I feel will get me comments, and sometimes I just rant about my lousy day or the cool book I just read. And sometimes I spam the friends list with useless memes, eh heh.

Another article on chain stores and pop culture.

*sigh* This is when I go into kneejerk reaction mode and start throwing tantrums about the destructiveness of large corporations that are trying to take over my world goddamnit! But the boy made a good point -- this means there's a huge niche for independent bookstores and music stores and etc. that will hopefully get MORE business because of this! Now I really want to work at a cool independent bookstore so I can get enough experience to start my own. My own independent sci-fi/fantasy bookstore... mmm... where I get to disseminate good, non-Robert Jordan/Mercedes Lackey fantasy (and hire someone who knows a lot more about good sci-fi than I do)...

Er. Anyway. Yeah.