eruthros

thingswithwings is running an important poll of importance on the characters who are best and worst at dirty talk.

I am hugely amused by the fact that the current front runners for "worst at dirty talk" are:
a ROBOT with NO EMOTIONS
an ANGEL with NO CORPOREAL BODY
and JOHN SHEPPARD.

Oh, John Sheppard.

So, a while ago I went over to thingswithwings's place. When we have dinner, we usually watch tv, but we couldn't decide what we wanted to watch. I was in a Sentinel mood, because of toft_froggy's joy about it, and thingswithwings has been trying to convince me to watch the new BSG for years. And so we had the following conversation:

eruthros: Hey, can I maybe convince you to watch a couple episodes of The Sentinel? It's awesomely bad!
tww: Oh, I don't know if I can watch much of that. What about finishing the BSG miniseries?
eruthros: But it's so depressing.
tww: Hey, I'll trade you an episode of The Sentinel for an episode of BSG!
eruthros: *falls down laughing*
tww: I'll even trade you one for one.
eruthros: omg, if you TOLD the BSG producers that you were swapping their show on an hour for hour basis with The Sentinel!
both: hysterical laughter for a while

But then we watched TS and BSG in alternation and ... actually ... this was a really good idea. Because everything that's missing from The Sentinel, I get from BSG; and everything that's missing from BSG, I get from The Sentinel. In the one, it's gritty and tense and the problems are well conceived -- and in the other, Jim says he needs to housebreak Blair and and Blair says "the ebola virus is BAD NEWS, man."* It really is everything I need in a TV show! Too bad it's two tv shows. But seriously, we've done three of these exchanges and it works beautifully. Highly recommended!

---
*It occurs to me that, if this were a wine pairing, it would be kind of like that guy who tries to figure out what wine to pair with cheetos.

I just spent all day in the library reading a ridiculous number of articles, half of which were disgustingly boring. So that sucked. And then I came home at nine fucking pm on a fucking Sunday and ... watched the young David Hewlett play Mr Typo the Reporter on Shining Time Station.

My fannishness apparently knows no shame. WHATEVER. I refuse to be judged!

***
Link list:

veejane tells us what to do when you can't win an argument in twenty fun and ridiculous rhetorical devices | Filk song, anyone? The Lurkers Support Me In Email. | What do you think the top ten most viewed pages are on Conservapedia? Check your guesses here. Hint: one of them is "gay bowel syndrome." | The first lengthy clips of Johnny Depp singing as Sweeney Todd in the Burton version. | Patricia Cornwell goes more than a little bit Anne Rice | America's most literate cities 2006, ranked by some dubious criteria -- but the criteria can all be looked at separately, which leads to some interesting results. | Over at blogstorm, take a look at the top ten worst websites, and they really mean worst. | We all knew David Hewlett will do ANYTHING for the show, but now we have proof: Doctor Rodney McKay's answering machine messages. No, really. With name options. | Article on the Literary Review's Bad Sex award. Winner to be announced November 27th. |

Aaaand probably other things that I've since forgotten.

Thing that is confusing: Seeing someone post about Elizabeth and her view of morals and expedience, and then talk about how that contrasts with Jack... and only at the end realizing that that was Elizabeth SWANN and Jack SPARROW, not Weir and O'Neill. Ooops.

Thing that is good: Smoked salmon-corn chowder, with many potatoes. (Because I had many potatoes.) Also, it is made with unsweetened soy milk, which horrifies the purists but makes me happy. And it is nummy.

Thing that is hilarious: The episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway? in season nine with Stephen Fry and the COOL people who know how the game works (his two episodes in season one were when they were still working out how the show worked on tv). Also he hosts a party quirks in one of the compilations for season nine. Hee! (The American version had "celebrities" like Richard Simmons. I'd rather celebrities like Stephen Fry.)

Thing that is annual: Today is the ... two hundred and fortyish anniversary of the Treaty of Paris, and the end of the Seven Years' War. Which means that today is the two hundred and somethingth anniversary of the day that France said "fine! whatever! you can have it!" and gave Canada to Great Britiain. We must celebrate the Treaty of Paris, because it led to such fabulous things as Paul Gross (speaking English!), Canadian television (in English! ... okay, I'm not gonna do that again), Callum Keith Rennie, the opportunity to pretend that British Columbia is another planet or possibly a Navajo site in the Southwest with aliens and bullshit plots, the RCMP, hockey, an inexplicable Smallville, Kansas with gigantic damns, Maritimes fiddling, k.d. lang, Leonard Cohen, the Headstones, Sandra Oh, Don McKellar, most of the really funny people on Whose Line Is It Anyway, and many other cool things as well. Of course, Canada also gives us Shania Twain and Celine Dion, so clearly the Treaty of Paris needed to be worded a little more carefully, but on the whole: Canadians? I'm glad I can talk to y'all without having to use my mangled French.

I'm not really on Sentinel lists anymore -- I'm still subscribed to P-L but not much comes out on it these days, and I bailed on all the fiction lists except for TLAD (which averages like two posts a month) ages ago. But today I suddenly took it into my head to go glance over new stories on 852 Prospect since I'd last checked ... which would be probably two years ago.

Things I found:

When I stopped reading unrecced stories in TS, Harry Potter fandom hadn't really made the big time. Not so now: BS Doesn't Always Stand for Blair Sandburg. Yep, that's right: this is a Harry Potter/Sentinel crossover. Even worse? Blair's a wizard. Worse than that? He's Severus Snape's love child. Severus. Snape's. Son. I just had to share the pain.

Ooooh, look! MPREG! But you wanna know what's unusual? Jim's the one who's pregnant. It's a sentinel mating-imperative thing. Problem, Child.

Predator, which demonstrates quite conclusively that the bad-anthro-theory fucked-up Sentinel serial-killer story is still alive and well. (If that's not an official genre in TS, it should be. It's why I adored cesperanza's Armchair so much.) Oh, and there's also In Deepest Consequence, which does the same for the one-of-the-other-cops-is-a-serial-killing-homophobe story. Whee?

Speaking of people who should have thought for a moment about reductio ad absurdum, or at the very least read one of cesperanza's stories (and I think y'all will instantly recognize which one I mean), I present The Littlest Guide, which features a two-year-old Blair bonding with ten-year-old Jim. I couldn't stand it long enough to skim for the plot, but I did read the first few paragraphs. On top of the basic two-year-old Blair problem, we have the "irritating baby talk" problem ("I no baby. I Blair. You mine. I you Guide. Sniff, now.") and the "spelling? grammar? pah!" problem (on one occasion, Blair is referred to as a "Guild") and the "indefinable Blair-ness of his scent" problem (Blair apparently smells like cinnamon and can release said scent on demand). *shudders*

Legion is still writing TS. Now, I think I first read one of her stories in ... 97? 98? Which makes that an incredibly long stay in a fandom. *is impressed*

Also? Through extensive skimming research, I have determined that Blair is now characterized as a screamer rather than a moaner. I don't know what this means, but that's someone else's job. (He still bounces, though. Constantly.)

***

*sighs* Oh, thank heavens.

I thought to myself "self, you have posted a most disturbing set of links, demonstrating that TS fandom still contains far too many 300K angst-o-ramas. Surely you must be able to find one good thing. Just one positive recommendation. That's all it'll take. Something to perk up your post."

And then I couldn't -- I started the first part of this post last Thursday. I scrolled back to January in 852 Prospect. I clicked on short stories and long stories and, really, anything that didn't have typos in the summary, and I bailed on almost all of them in the first sentence. Nothing! Nothing at all!

And now I have finally found something good and, though it's not a surprise, it's really the best I can do: jacquez wrote another installment in her Dog Tags series. The Illusionist is a good story. Sadly, it's a story by someone I've read and liked before, and thus really not what I was looking for at all, but at the moment? I'll take what I can get.