doctor who

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So we’re a few episodes in now on the new guy, and I know some of you out there are watching directly via the BBC, some of you are watching via BBC America, and some of you are using Means Which Shall Not Be Mentioned! Me, I’ll eschew going into specific episode details since I don’t know who’s up to date with what–but I will say I’m caught up through the most recent BBC episode, “The Time of Angels”.

And suffice to say, yeah, I’m down with the new guy. He’ll do. ;)

I’m always going to miss Tennant, who I daresay will always be My Doctor(TM), but I’m happy to see Matt Smith starting to get his bearings with the role. In the first couple of episodes, it’s the Murkworks consensus that he’s still channeling a bit too much Tennant. When he’s not chanelling Tennant, he’s apparently channeling Two, a.k.a. Shemp Doctor in our house; userinfosolarbird and userinfospazzkat, as the original Classic Who fans in the house, are better at picking that out than I am. But I can kind of see it as well. As of the most recent episode, though, there are moments when Smith seems to finally meld both of these influences into something new and therefore his own.

Companion-wise, I like Amy Pond pretty well so far too. Yeah, she’s pretty much still in the mode of clever, beautiful young woman we’ve had established as the Standard Companion with New Who. But on the other hand, she’s starting to show the sorts of cleverness that seem best on display in the episodes Moffat previously wrote. And she’s got the best Companion backstory, hands down, ever.

I think too that the most recent episode, fourth one they’ve aired so far, is the first one to really feel like the season’s truly underway and not just hitting all the usual notes of “okay we’re introducing a new Doctor AND a new Companion and oh hey let’s get the obligatory Dalek episode out of the way”. userinfomamishka and userinfojennygriffee have been joining us for Doctor viewing the last couple of weeks, and I mentioned to everyone that with this week’s episode, one of the things I really enjoyed was the simple fact that the Weeping Angels are the most effective monster that the new show has ever introduced. And this episode? A worthy followup indeed to “Blink”.

Which of course leads me to mentioning River Song. No real surprise that she’s back too since her introduction was also in a Moffat episode–but we were also all in strong, strong agreement that the handling of her return was excellent, and as is very fitting in a show featuring time travel, continuing the delightfully screwed up timeline of meetings between her and the Doctor.

Yeah. I think our favorite Time Lord’s in good hands indeed.

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Let’s clear out the backlog of new ebook and print book purchases, shall we?

Picked up in print from the Norwescon dealers’ room:

  • The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks, and The Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks. The former is a graphic novel adaptation of a section of the latter. I’d already listened to an audio copy of the latter but didn’t have a print copy, so picking one up was required!
  • Dawn of the Dreadfuls, by Steve Hockensmith. This is a prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, basically setting up how the Bennett sisters became such infamous zombie slayers! Okay, yeah, I couldn’t resist.
  • Chicks Dig Time Lords, by assorted folks. This is the essay collection I wanted, billing itself as being all about Doctor Who, by the women who love it. Pretty much required reading for me!
  • The Mystery of Grace, by Charles de Lint. Urban fantasy. Because apparently I still need more Charles de Lint in my life!

And, yoinked in ebook form down from Barnes and Noble:

  • Dead Matter, by userinfoantonstrout. Book 3 of the Simon Canderous series. Urban fantasy.
  • Embers, by Laura Bickle. Urban fantasy. Bonus points for the heroine on the cover actually having a head!
  • Compromised and Revealed, by Kate Noble. Historical romance. Bought on the strength of the userinfosmartbitches review of the forthcoming The Summer of You, and which I will also be buying as soon as B&N has it on their ebook store.
  • Master of None, by Sonya Bateman. Urban fantasy. Heard some nice buzz about this one and have to frankly admit that I was drawn to it because the guy on the cover kind of looks like Sawyer on Lost. (Mmm, Sawyer!)
  • World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, by Max Brooks. SF/Horror/Humor. Bought in ebook form, and this time NOT as a replacement for the print copy, just because this book is that awesome.

This brings the total for 2010 up to 104. And it’ll be going up to 107 as soon as Barnes and Noble lets me buy userinfojimbutcher‘s Changes, Ann Aguirre’s Hell Fire, and the aforementioned Kate Noble!

And as soon as I buy the brand new Amelia Peabody, A River in the Sky, it’ll be 108. There is, indeed, a new Amelia Peabody. Y’all may remember I have expressed some disappointment in Ms. Peters’ last few efforts, but this one? This involves the Ark of the Covenant. As an Indiana Jones fangirl, I think I’m morally obligated to check this one out. Plus, I did engage in the handy “Get a free sample” B&N ebook feature, and it started out strong enough that okay, yeah, I’ll be buying this too!

Meanwhile, userinfospazzkat, userinfosolarbird, userinfomamishka and I did a lovely doubleheader of this week’s Castle and the brand new Eleventh Doctor tonight. Picoreviews: speaking of Indy, as an Indy fangirl, I am now solidly in favor of Nathan Fillion playing Indy if they ever pry the part away from Harrison. He just looked too adorable in the fedora. ;) And, Eleven? Yeah. He’s a keeper. Brand new icons will be required. And I’ll be posting more in depth about the new Doctor tomorrow, I think!

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41 and feeling good

I’ve been getting lovely comments dropped on my Facebook wall from folks who saw there what today is, and I’ve gotten the usual lovely email from userinfostickmaker wishing me natal felicitations. What I did not expect however was to get a little email from the folks who run JournalFen, wishing me a happy birthday and inviting me to send in and/or post interesting birthday stories. That was awfully nice of them and makes me glad I’m continuing to maintain an account on their servers. So this is me sending out a shoutout to JF’s staff: thanks, folks! Thanks also to all of you who have already sent me comments. :)

Birthday Weekend 2010 for Anna will be involving a second viewing of Avatar tonight and probable sushi. There will be cake, but it’ll be tomorrow in conjunction with this week’s Jam, since I didn’t want to have cake and pie in the house at the same time and I felt it would be lame to offer partly eaten birthday cake to folks who show up for Jam. I will however have a fancy cupcake tonight as Birthday Cake standin, the thanks for which go of course to my lovely userinfosolarbird!

Also as part of this weekend’s laid-back fun, Dara and I listened to the first CD of one of the Big Finish Doctor Who audios I bought her for Christmas, and that was great! First of all it was fun to hear Paul McGann reprising the role of the Eighth Doctor, but even more fun was hearing a Dalek Supreme actually be–at least by Dalek standards–subtle. It’s not too spoilery to say that the general thrust of this plot is that Eight and his new companion Lucie wind up on the planet Red Rocket Rising, which has just been devastated by an asteroid strike. And oh hey, a passing alien fleet has just offered to rescue the human survivors from the planet–and OHNOEZ they’re Daleks.

What the Daleks are up to, pretending to be compassionate, is part of the great fun of this episode. In particular there’s an awesome bit where the Dalek Supreme first learns from the Acting President of the planet that the Doctor is around–and you can just hear the Dalek forcibly keeping itself from going ballistic. Later it pretty much orders the President to turn over the Doctor in exchange for Dalek assistance, and Dara and I lost it hearing it say “THE DOCTOR IS AN ENEMY OF THE DALEKS! HE MUST BE EX… TRADITED!”

Unrelatedly, more fun was had last night as I did indeed spend the rest of my Amazon gift certificate. Many thanks to you all for your extensive book and music recommendations! The things I wound up purchasing were:

  • The Green Glass Sea, recommended by userinfosutures1. YA.
  • Mark of the Demon, recommended by userinfoalfvaen. Urban fantasy.
  • Graceling, recommended earlier to me on Goodreads by userinforosepurr. YA/fantasy.

This brings the total of books acquired in 2010 up to 25!

Just about all of the rest of the recommended titles have gone onto my Goodreads Recommended shelf, and I’ll get to them as best I can! Some of them aren’t available in digital form so I may wind up checking them out from the library. Yay, books!

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So now that I’m done writing up all the rest of my 2009 Book Log reviews, it’s time to jump over to another topic near and dear to my heart. Let’s talk Doctor. And specifically, the Doctor Who “End of Time” story, which I’m pretty sure most of you reading this will have seen by now. But just in case you haven’t, oh my yes ginormous spoilers behind the cut!

And, picoreview: fairly sloppy story overall with some moments of beauty. Russell T. Davies does tearjerking sentiment much better than he does logical cohesion of plot these days, I fear. And man, I’m going to miss David. Sniff. (Okay, yeah, the tearjerking sentiment got to me! ;) )

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I’m coming off a nice long vacation, thanks to my workplace having given the entire lot of us the week of Christmas off. This was as the cool kids say AWESOME, given that it meant that userinfosolarbird and I were able to have Longest Night without me having to take an extra day off for that. And that was a nice way indeed to fire off a relaxing break.

The weekend of the Solstice was pretty much given over to, aside from a special Solstice Murkjam (more on this in another post), a mighty rewatching of the entire extended edition Lord of the Rings trilogy. There are few movies I can happily watch over and over again, but these? Absolutely. Especially when Dara starts asking me questions about Middle-Earth lore and we get to Tolkiengeek. <3 Plus, this time around I started finally watching a lot of the copious extras in all three sets of discs, which I had never done despite owning these things for years now. I'm sure you all know by now, but yeah, lots of lovely stuff there and I've only barely scratched the surface of it all.

Did a lot of catchup of medical appointments during the week, and the highlight of that was getting to touch bases with both my endocs and say "by the way, I'm working on seriously trying to lose weight, just so you all know". In particular, wanted to check with the thyroid endoc to make sure I coordinate with him about how to reduce my T4 and T3 dosage as I drop pounds. I've already had to start tweaking my intake since I've dropped six pounds or so.

I dropped in on userinfokathrynt to say hi in between some of those aforementioned medical appointments, and was treated to tea and a cookie and her delightful offspring informing us, when asked where her dump truck was, “it could be ANYWHERE!” Lillian continues to impress me with her smarts. This kid is going to be scary when she gets older. Hell, she’s kind of scary now!

Christmas itself was pleasantly low-key and featured first going out with userinfomamishka to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. Picoreview: big silly fun if you can buy that this was totally a fluffy, alternate-universe version of Holmes and Watson that didn’t bear too much resemblance to the canon versions. I did like many get a kick out of the chemistry between Holmes and Watson, and felt that poor Mary was sadly underused as a character, and that the actress playing Irene wasn’t quite up to the task of her own character’s awesomeness. But really, the thing I liked the most about the movie? The music. Especially the jigs during the action scenes and the take of “Rocky Road to Dublin”. I may have to buy the soundtrack on the strength of that alone.

Christmas evening, userinfomamishka, userinfodarthhellokitty, and userinfoking_chiron all had dinner with us at the Murk and then we all watched the new Doctor Who, “The End of Time, Part 1″. Most definitely more on this in another post. There are rumblings of another group watch of Part 2 to come.

I closed out this past weekend with going, finally, with Dara to see 2012 before it finally vanishes out of the local theaters. We wound up having to catch it at the Alderwood Mall cinema, which was really kinda crazytalk since the place was swarming with after-Christmas shoppers and getting from our parking spot to the theater was a nerve-wracking exercise in dodging oncoming traffic. But we did manage to get there on time, and once we were actually settled in, despite being too close to the screen for comfort, we had a delightful time. I’m sure many of you already know this by now too, but yeah, this movie was awesomely bad. We’re talking epic levels of MSTable disaster pr0n, which is pretty much exactly what we were there for. Mutating neutrinos, baby!

Didn’t get a damn bit of writing or reading done, but on the whole, I didn’t really mind. I’ve been catching up on fixing broken stuff on this web site instead, and that sits well with me, since the long-undone tasks there were annoying me, and I found fixing those relaxing. I assure you all though that more writing and reading will be coming with the New Year.

And oh yes: with userinfospazzkat coming home from Virginia on Sunday, we had our little house gift exchange. My nifty l00t: one box of Ninth Doctor DVDs (man, I do love Nine and Rose, I must say), one lovely tin of bath bombs from LUSH, one $50 Barnes and Noble gift card which I promptly spent on five new ebooks, and last but not least, this, which is pretty much the Best Possible Christmas Ornament to Give to Anna, Ever:

Indy Ornament

Carefully, Indy

There’s a button on it that plays the Raiders March when you press it. userinfospazzkat knows me very, very well. <3

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I am now going to take time out of my wibblings over Nanowrimo to wibble over “Waters of Mars” instead!

Picoreview: Ye gods that was grim. Spoilers locked up in the dome beyond the cut!

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A Whoniverse postulation

Captain Jack Harkness is very lucky that the Doctor’s last few regenerations have been younger and hotter–or else very unlucky, depending on your point of view, because he’d have had entirely different interactions with oh, say, the First Doctor.

Discuss!

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