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Either I need to stop listening to certain CDs over and over and over at work, or I really need to a) get and b) teach myself Premiere. Because really, isn't Me First and the Gimme Gimme's version of It's Raining on Prom Night just call out for a Buffy Prom centered vid?

More thoughts on Otherland, no spoilers: One minor thing I really liked about Otherland was how the cast of characters was multiracial -- Renie and !Xabbu from Africa, Martine from France, people from Asia, Australia, etc. Too often when I read scifi (which, granted, isn't that often at all), it seems as though people just assume that America has conquered space. I remember mentioning something like this to one of my friends, how I liked the Ender series because they had worlds colonized by the Portuguese and the Chinese and the Japanese and Norweigians and why most scifi books didn't seem that multicultural... she said something back like how it was much more realistic to have American colonies everywhere in space because the country was so advanced technologically and whatnot. Rather got my gander up. But anyhow, I liked how Otherland didn't assume that the future would be comprised of one culture and one race. This is also why I like Octavia E. Butler too.

I also liked how much the book was intelligently informed by Tokien, something I probably never would have noticed (or thought about, since it would be hard to not notice Orlando repeatedly referring to LotR) if not for selenak's comments on the Memory, Sorrow, Thorn trilogy. I never even noticed until the end of the book how there were nine companions "chosen." Was trying to match people up with the Fellowship, but never quite got it straight... I also liked the influence of fairy tales and children's stories and myths, something Williams really got to play with thanks to the structure of his world.

More on Gaffney -- finished the book, which immediately got fuzzy ten pages after the last time I wrote! Well, not fuzzy per se, but definitely a lot less angsty and dark and disturbing than it was. Read reviews on Laurie Likes Books, and I think a lot of people had a problem with the hero, which is fully understandable. I personally loved the beginning because it didn't feel like a romance at all and had interesting ways of using sex scenes. But the writing was good, and I probably will be picking up more Gaffney in the future. I also found out apparently she's known for writing joy! Trust me to find the one exception... I did that with Laura Kinsale too, with the Prince of Midnight, which I also loved because it had an angsty and tortured heroine and a hero that acted much more like a typical heroine. Plus, it actually thought about love at first sight and what love was and why people loved each other. So I read her other books because I thought she did the tortured heroine bit, and turns out she normally does the hugely tortured hero! Tortured heroes are fine, but they don't really hit any of my kinks like tortured heroines, because really, how often is the hero not tortured and broody and/or sexually promiscuous? Besides, I sympathize a lot more with a tortured heroine rather than a heroine taking care of her tortured hero.

Still need to find the Alias premiere to dl... argh, almost done with season one, but can't get my hands on season 2!!

Links:
- gwyneira's review of To Have and To Hold