Sunday, August 07, 2016

August Currentlies

Because it is August.

Current clothes: Black ankle socks. Khaki shorts. A black t-shirt that says, "I spend my life crushed beneath my TBR pile." For you non-biblioholics, "TBR" stands for "To Be Read," and what the shirt says is true. I spend my life crushed beneath my TBR pile metaphorically, and I will not be entirely surprised if I end my life crushed beneath it literally.

Current mood: OK. Lately I've kind of been in that state where I find it hard not to stress out about all kinds of stupid stuff -- I'm mostly blaming the disruption of the driveway work this time -- but I think I'm feeling slightly more relaxed today. We'll see if it lasts.

Current music: Nothing notable. I don't remember what the iPod last served me when I random-shuffled it.

Current annoyance: So many. So. Many. But if I have to pick one, let's go with having actual humidity in the air. I am not used to this, and I don't like it. Sweat should evaporate immediately, not hang around soaking through your clothes! Plus, the A/C in my house is evaporative cooling, which means that when we get days that are both hot and humid, I'm pretty much screwed.

Current thing: Trying to get big home improvement projects done. Buying too many books. Also, fictional skeletons. I don't understand that last one, either.

Current desktop picture: In honor of my current thing, and my ongoing re-reading of Terry Pratchett, I have finally replaced my favorite Time Lord with this awesome artwork featuring Death and a kitty cat.

Current book: I just finished The World in Flames, a memoir about growing up in a doomsday cult. Next up is Pratchett's Thief of Time.

Current song in head: Songs have been flitting in and out of my head like crazy lately. This morning I woke up with "Bad Reputation" by Joan Jett in my brain. I have no idea what that means; it didn't have anything at all to do with anything I was dreaming about.

Current refreshment: Nothing. But I'm kind of thirsty.

Current DVD in player: Just finished disc 1 of season one of The Expanse (meaning I've seen up through episode three). In principle, I like the idea of this show a lot. This kind of solar-system-based hard(ish) SF thing has never really been done on TV, and I feel like the medium is probably ripe for it. In practice, though, I'm having trouble getting interested in it. The characters and the plot are kind of generic-feeling, and some of the worldbuilding stuff seems over-exposited to me while other stuff is a little hard to follow. But I've been warned that it starts out this way, and assured by at least a couple of people that it eventually gets more engaging. And so far I'm liking it at least a little better with each episode, which is encouraging. I am curious to see what they do with it.

Current happy thing: Even if there has been a lot of stressful stuff around it, I do have a new driveway! Yay! That so, so needed to be done.

Current thought: Ummmm.... Hang on... I'm sure I can come up with one...

4 comments:

  1. I'm a huge fan of the Expanse books, and a pretty big fan of how it's been translated to series. But I have no clear sense of how the show looks to anyone who doesn't already know where it's headed.

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    1. To me, not knowing where it's headed, it looks a bit slow, and sometimes a little bit confusing, but potentially pretty interesting.

      Not knowing the books, of course, I can't comment on the series as an adaptation, but I will say that it does a lot of things, in terms of worldbuilding details, etc, that are familiar to me from a lifetime of consuming written SF but that I've never seen translated onto a TV screen, and even if I'm still not 100% sure how I feel about the series as a whole, I do give it a lot of points for how much care it's putting into that stuff.

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    2. I've just got around to following up the Expanse link. Judging by the brief synopsis on that page, it sounds like it might be the sort of thing that Isaac Asimov could have written featuring Lije Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw.

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    3. Like much subsequent SF, it probably does owe a debt of influence to Asimov, although I don't know how strong the similarities actually are in this case.

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