Sooo they said Dollhouse would really take off at around the sixth episode and as far as I can tell they did not lie. (I am of course biased because I didn't think the first five episodes were all that shabby either.) ( Spoilers for Dollhouse episodes 5 and 6 )
In other news....
The lounge where we watch Castle switched from third to second floor, because some freaking jerks on the second floor kicked us out so they could watch Secret Life of an American Teenager or something. I don't care if the sign-up sheet got switched without them noticing; that's not our fault! We were all there first and it wouldn't have been that hard for them to go down one floor that night. Besides, I know that most of them wound up talking in a room for the first fifteen minutes anyway!

Plus Castle is a way better show. (Although I did make an unfavorable comparison between it and Bones the other day. Castle has wit, but I can usually solve the murder pretty quickly. Still, it's only been what, two shows? So there' plenty of room for improvement. And I have to give credit to a mystery show which doesn't use Magic Forensic Tools to "solve" the crimes. *coughcoughMagicBlueFlashlightcoughcough* The characters are all pretty adorable, although the police are pretty meh so far (save for the heroine WHO IS AMAZING GLEE!!!).

And GRRR Bones gets pre-empted for American Idol??? But they were going to go to the zoo!!!

Yaaaay, caught up on Dollhouse! Which, okay, I only missed one episode, but still. It's way more fun to watch stuff with people! Although I did get my brother to watch with me. That was fun! He was confused though, which I suppose means I am a freak for not being confused. (Or at least am willing to live with confusion.) So I got to rewatch all the episodes while he figured out what the hell was going on. We both agree that Boyd is cool.
( Re: Episode 5 )

Why why WHY is the season 2 finale of Bones on a whole friggin separate disc????? I wouldn't even waste my free rental on that!!!


GAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!! WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY!!!!!!!!!!!

I've been watching Dollhouse since it started, and I have to say I don't understand what's with the people who complain that it's not a good show OR the people who say "just stick with it! Fox screwed it! Let it get better!"

( (Spoilers for Dollhouse) )
In sum, I don't give a damn if other people do or don't wanna watch Dollhouse. Let's just accept the fact that 3 episodes is rather soon to be making judgements about how the entire show is going to be, but that any amount of episodes is an acceptable amount for someone to decide if they wanna keep watching. I'm looking forward to the next episode and that is all I care about.

Also, catching the last few minutes of the Sarah Connor Chronicles is making me wonder if I should look into that. Terminator isn't really my thing, and it looks like the characters get put through hell which is also iffy to me, but then again there is robot ass-kicking and I am not as squeamish about character suffering as my mother.

Currently sitting in my dorm room, wishing I felt more like writing because for once I actually have the time, but I simply cannot write anything at the moment. My hands itch in that way that lets me know I want to create and do things for once, but it's not working for writing alone. I guess I'll draw or something, but I'm not very keen about going back in the lounge. Everything's just getting on my nerves a lot and I need to have breaks from other people. The whole floor's been really tetchy, actually. So I don't wanna go out and draw there, even if it might be nice to be pseudo-social, because I really, really, really don't want other people looking over my shoulder while I draw. It's not so bad with writing, because most of my friends are crackaddicts fannish/weird too, so mpreg fic just gets "You don't need to say it's Juno with boys, I speak yaoi." But drawings are harder to explain and more people feel like they can/should comment on it, which would really piss me off right now because I am not in a sharing mood.

Ugh. I wish the lounge was less crowded, because I'd really rather be out there than in here. It's so messy. And the internet is distracting!

Blergh. Was reading perfectly decent, loooooong story with a lovely lead-in. The rest of it, however, is the epitome of good writing, bad fic. First off, I hate the rendering of Anamarie's speech. So far as I know, she doesn't speak with a ridiculous accent. So the fact that she does in the fic makes me unhappy. She's also capable of managing her temper, so the fact that Anamarie is practically invisible expect for when she's raising a fuss is extra-annoying. As is the manner in which most of the pirates are characterized as speaking with ridiculous accents and characterized with varying degrees of the same character traits. Yes, it's nice to indicate the variety of accents and languages spoken in the Caribbean during this time. But not when they speak like charactures!

Then there's Norrington's inexplicable friendship with random lower-level navy men. I bow to the necessity that he have some friends, I acknowledge that many of his interactions with them are quite witty, but I really, really, really need more explanation for how a Commodore and some random guys all started hanging out in bars. "They agreed to pretend to be peers whilest drinking" does not suffice, although were I enjoying the fic more, I'd be able to overlook it. However, once the Sparrington romance got into full-swing, it started to bleed into the other friend parts and make them stupid. Irrational Jealousy is a really OLD way of showing that Character X secretly has real feelings for Character Y. And the angst set up elsewhere in the fic really doesn't need the help.

Plus the historical opposition to same-sex relationships is, like, barely a problem. And some conflict over that is why I went looking for Sparrington in the first place, so this is totally not satisfying at all. I wonder why I am even interested in finishing it, as opposed to finishing the "Identity" series for Sentinel fandom.

Arrghkpbtbleh.

Am reading a year-old post with commentators complaining about how much fanfic there is with just sex, and while I agree that fanfic can get pretty repetitive and PWP can sometimes take over everything, I do not think that it is a bad thing that many writers include explicit sex scenes instead of fading out. The sex is not pointless, not titilating, and not irrelevant. There is a point to including those scenes and it is not just to write something hot and titilating or to attract more readers. Writers are making statements and points about sex and desire that, though they may not add anything to other themes in the fic, are still important. Why should explicit sex scenes be banished to PWPs?

And speaking of PWP, that is often a misnomer. Just because it's focused on the sex or mostly sex doesn't mean there's no plot there. The sex can be the plot- whether we think of it as "the order in which Liz and Jack did various sexual things" or "Liz gets over her sexual anxieties while having sex with Jack" or "Jack and Liz illustrate various emotions/dynamics that may occur during sex or in sexual relationships." Are PWPs any less plotty than fics that consist only of character musings, fluff, or simply reveal one aspect of a character? Hell no! Even the PWPs I don't like have plots. The plots may bore me, may be cliche, may be completely OOC, but they're still there. It's not like Jackson Pollack, Pablo Picasso, and a two year old got together and threw scrabble tiles at a wall until one of them spelled something dirty and then transcribed the whole thing and uploaded it to FFnet.

What the post and it's sign-ons really seem to be saying is that they can't find specific types of plots anymore. Specifically, plots that primarily deal with things other than sex and romance, or plots that involve a lot of action as opposed to reflection. Which, yeah, I don't see that much of. Action-adventure type plots seem to be much more common for fandoms based on kid's cartoons, like Digimon. Frankly, a lot of the ones I see kind of suck. It is harder to find gen/action fics than to find romance fics. But the caveot is that it's easier to find gen fics than to find good romance fics, and a lot of good gen fics are simply labeled pre-ship because they focus on the relationship between two characters that are frequently shipped or that the author ships. So gen isn't dead and I really wish the OP and first few commentators hadn't hated on ship fans or romance fans as if the existence of romance and sex in fanfic was driving gen and non-explicit fans to extinction. Fic in every genre is at risk of becoming stale. It's not the shippers or the romance-lovers who are solely responsible for all this.

But of course, responding to any of this there would seem a little weird, as the conversation is pretty much over and I bet there've already been several responses to it that I liked. It's not a bad post, but the Fandom is Stale! Blame the Shippers/Sexx0rs! vibe annoyed me. I agree with most of the actual post (LABEL YOUR NON-CON, FOLKS!), especially the part the opposite of noncon being someone's kink, but the comments complaining about how fandom's gotta eroticize everything should quite whining. There's a way to describe the sort of fics they want and ask why they're not so common that doesn't start trashing on the shippers and sexx0r-loving folk. Do that. Otherwise, we'll just get bogged down ragging on other people's kinks and then nobody learns anything.

Aaaaaaaaand the instant I made the last post, my friend linked to a truly appalling story which I literally could not read. My eyeballs recoiled. It was the sort of thing where I think nobody could seriously believe the author wrote it for the purposes of pleasing others, even if the thing did include numerous cries of "review plz! lol omg thx fir sayin nice things!!! to all yus haters SHUT UP!!1!!11!!! XP lol lol lol" every. other. line!

And no, I will not inflict that story upon anyone else, even the willing, by providing a link.

In other news, metafandom needs to stop distracting me from the stories I'm trying to write. I mean, I'm finally actually writing again, as opposed to just trying to write, and whenever writing a scene begins to lag I wind up browsing metafandom or fanlore. This has been exceptionally noticeable of late, as the most recent metafandom posts I've read were about art... and lo and behold, I suddenly wanted to do nothing but draw! It's disappointing to realize I'm so impressionable.

While talking with a friend of mine, who mentioned that as she got more into fandom, she found it harder and harder to find stories that she liked. I, on the other hand, keep getting into fandoms and mindlessly reading nearly everything that's out there. My talents at skimming fic are better, I'm waaaay better at knowing when a fic isn't going to be good or appeal to me, and I use things established in previous stories to fill in where one story isn't good enough. So while her tolerance for cliches, and shoddy fic has gone down, I'd say that mine has gone up in general. I still don't really read fic that I think sucks or anything, but I will knowingly decide to stick with a mediocre fic for a bit longer, and when I do hit the back button on a story, I get less frustrated than I used to. Like, it's been a long time since I really got upset with Mary Sue stories. So I wonder if I've just gotten better at avoiding fics I just won't like, or if I've just grown used to a literary environment the includes *very* amateur writers.

Of course, my perception may be skewed by the fact that of the past few fandoms I was interested in, one was Star Trek:TOS where archives with great fics were easy to find, and the others were mostly small fandoms where fics I'd enjoy were typically easy to identify. Whereas my friend has been pretty involved with only one fandom during the same time, which makes low quality fics more annoying, especially when that's the only thing that keeps showing up or when fic one doesn't like dominates the comms.

With the holidays have come a whole host of TV shows on DVD to watch. It's a wonder no one in my family works in law enforcement, given our penchant for mysteries and detective shows. Psych appears to have settled into a nice, comfortable comedy slot. Gus just got more adorable! And there were a couple of great Jules-centric episodes too. That made me so happy; I was worried that she'd get zero character development. She's still pretty conventional as characters go, but I'm less worried that she'll become two-dimensional. I like the cop-buddy moments between her and Lassiter.

( Moonlighting, Paper Chase, and special effects )

Unrelated note: I'm worried that I'll forget when new Bones episodes start airing again. I think I missed an episode or two of this season anyway. I still need to watch season 3. I think it came out already, but I know if I go to Blockbuster to check, I'll wind up trying to find Xena or X-files instead. And I know my Blockbuster doesn't have the X-files TV series. (For shame!) I'll probably wind up buying it or something- or maybe watching it over the summer (didn't I intend to do that with the original Star Trek? And I'm not even past season one. Whoops!), but first I'll have to pry myself out of the house. (HAHAHA, and maybe they'll let Pluto be a planet again.)

Qu'as-tu dit?
    Fandom: X-Men
    Characters: Northstar and Iceman.
Jean-Paul teases Bobby. Just a little story about how speaking multiple languages can be lots of fun.... especially if your conversation partner doesn't know a lick of French.

And of course, there is a copy over at the Pit of Voles. (Do we still call it that?)