Geeky Summer TV

I launched into the new book yesterday, getting the first scene/the first 2,000 or so words done. Even better, the book seems to have taken over my brain already. I stayed in bed really late this morning in spite of waking up really early because entire scenes were flooding into my head, and when The Voices start talking like that, it's a good idea to listen. I think there will be a writing marathon today to try to capture everything that came to me last night. I'm remembering how much I love these characters. This may come across as blasphemy to some, but I may even like them more than Katie and Owen. They're a lot more complex and a little more messed-up while still being essentially good people who are trying to do the right thing.

In other news, I'm almost done with my latest knitting project, which I hope to reveal on Monday. It's really complicated and required learning a few new techniques, but the part I messed up on was the simple ribbing at the end. After doing a bunch of lace from a chart and then doing a pattern involving all sorts of bobbles and crossovers, I lost count on a simple knit three, purl one rib and had to undo almost an entire row -- and a row is 311 stitches. But now that the rib's properly established, it's a lot more brainless.

I've been getting all this knitting done because there's been a fair amount of geeky TV on lately, so let's catch up.

There's Primeval: New World on SyFy, a Canadian version of the British series, now finally showing in the US but, sadly, already cancelled in Canada after one season. I had to wait for SyFy to rerun the first couple of episodes because I assumed wrongly that it would be available OnDemand, like everything else on SyFy. When I caught up, I really liked it. One thing I like is that it's more on the CSI model, where it follows the events in a different location in the same universe, rather than being a remake of the original series where they try to map the characters onto the original cast. That means there's no Nerdboy. I know he was popular among the younger fangirls because he's allegedly cute (I much preferred the big-game-hunter research assistant from the first couple of seasons, though I ended up liking the actor even better when he got to be the comic relief in CHAOS), but as a character it seemed like they couldn't decide if he was Gilligan or The Professor. Half the time he was getting himself and sometimes others into trouble because he was a total idiot, but then they also tried to make him the brilliant inventor who came up with all the devices that saved the day, and by the end he was also some kind of romantic hero, and just ugh, really. But in this series, they all seem to be reasonably competent adult professionals who I can imagine actually doing this stuff. I like the team interactions. We haven't seen a lot of him, but I rather love the idea of the air force officer stuck in the X-Files/Project Blue Book kind of job who gets the surprise of his life when someone actually reports something relevant to him, and he has to use those protocols he's been sitting on while twiddling his thumbs in boredom.

Fortunately, Sinbad is OnDemand, so I can watch it on Sunday afternoons when I eat lunch and read the newspaper after church. I certainly wouldn't schedule my life around it or even bother recording it. It's supremely cheesy British fantasy fluff with just enough meat in it to be mildly intriguing. They've got a good set-up for a voyage kind of series, with the rag-tag group on the ship whose professional crew mostly died in a storm, and Our Hero is under a curse so that he'll die if he stays on land for more than a day. So they sail from port to port, having adventures before hightailing it back to the boat before sunrise. Unfortunately, this suffers the same ills as most of the recent British fantasy fare aimed mostly at teen-ish viewers, in that it comes across as way too contemporary. The characters in this vaguely medieval Middle East talk like modern Londoners, complete with slang and idioms. Sinbad wouldn't turn heads walking down any modern city street, since he wears cargo shorts and a t-shirt. The sense of modern was what kept me from being able to deal with Merlin, and it irked me with Robin Hood. With Robin Hood, one of the behind-the-scenes features even talked about how their costumes were designed so that kids could find clothes like that in the local High Street shops, so Robin Hood wore Ye Olde Hoodye. I guess they think that modern kids won't relate to anything that's not just like their own lives. Don't they realize that the allure of costume dramas is the costumes? What's the point of something set in a different time and place if I can buy the same things in the mall? Anyway, Sinbad must have caught my imagination on some level because I found myself dreaming an episode the other night. Or, at least, I was dreaming a fantasy story set on a boat.

I caught the first episode of Under the Dome, and while the plot intrigues me, I don't particularly care about any of the characters yet. I mostly spent the hour making snowglobe jokes, since Haven's Christmas episode a couple of years ago was inspired by the same source material, and it turned out to be a girl with powers who was turning the town into a snowglobe. Every time someone ran into the dome in this series, I'd hum a little "Silent Night." I think my main interest in this series will be mapping the King tropes.

It's not new, but my schedule has finally adjusted to allow me to watch Person of Interest, and I think I'm hooked. It would be nice if it were available OnDemand, though, since that's why I didn't watch it in the first place (it was on when I had a class, then wasn't OnDemand, so I didn't get hooked enough to want to record it, so I just didn't watch). I really like the characters (I'm kind of a sucker for the soft-spoken, unassuming badass), though I'm a bit lost on the big-picture story. I love the dog. But now that my dance classes have moved back to Tuesday nights and I no longer have major programming conflicts, guess where they're moving the show? Now I might be hooked enough to record it, though.

As for my question about blog content, I'm rather surprised that people are still intrigued by my daily life. I'm not intrigued by my own daily life. Maybe I'll make up one and start writing about it.