purplecat

Reading: I have decided to re-read Lord of the Rings. This is proceeding slowly, but not as slowly as something I don't want to read. Just concluded the Council of Elrond.

Listening: A podcast on the potential dominance of the EV market by the Chinese. This is part of my continual and largely failing attempt to understand Economics.

Watching: We just finished watching season 8 (I think) of Bones which ended on a cliffhanger (Bones was framed). I look forward to Bones being exonerated when we move on to season 9 tonight.

Reading: All Flesh is Grass - Una McCormack's contribution to the Timelord Victorious books. I was surprised to discover this is a comedy. I'm not sure it entirely works, but I think its flaws are inherent to the whole multimedia extravaganza that was Timelord Victorious coupled with the fact that I've not been exactly reading these fast. Anyway, I've slightly lost track of which threads I've simply forgotten and which threads are off-shoots of some piece of media I haven't chosen to encounter.

Listening: Haunter in the Dark - BBC Sounds latest in their occasional series of updates to Lovecraft stories. It's well done, and I can see why they keep making these, but the premise (a podcast investigating Cthulhoid goings on) is beginning to wear a little thin if only because everyone should be well and truly insane by this point in the proceedings.

Watching: It turns out we had missed the start of this year's Masterchef: The Professionals so we are catching up.

Reading: Eric Saward's targetised version of Revelation of the Daleks. I don't much like the television incarnation of this story. I didn't like Saward's longer version of the novelisation. And yet, here I am, because completism.

Listening: I have discovered the Memory Cheats podcast in which our hosts (well known from Radio Free Skaro and The Writers' Room among other podcasts) discuss a randomly chosen Doctor Who story based on memory alone. They are working through the Jodie Whittaker stories at present and I'm enjoying the discussions - possibly because I mostly agree with them.

Watching: Last night was a David McCallum tribute watch. Sapphire and Steel we deemed too long, but we watched an episode of The Man from Uncle and an episode of NCIS.

Almost nothing to be honest.

Technically I'm Reading Dinosaurs Rediscovered by Michael J. Benton, but its been sat untouched on my bedside table for nearly a month. I'm not sure why I'm not reading exactly - I mean I'm a little miffed that it doesn't cite B's work despite going on about how we now know how fast T. rex runs, but I don't really think that explains it.

Equally technically, I'm watching the live-action Cowboy Bebop. I was watching it through with B before he left for Svalbard, but he'd already watched all of it in Japanese (for reasons which are somewhat unclear to me) so I have instructions to go ahead and watch the rest without him. Maybe I'm just sad that Netflix cancelled it after a season and so we will never get to see Radical Edward properly.

I am listening to stuff since I'm working on getting my running distance back up, and I have a three hour round trip to visit Mum each weekend. Currently an episode of The Target Bookclub about which I have complained before. So I'm listening, but I'm not sure why I'm listening. Completism probably.

Reading: Dalek - the novelisation of the story of the same name by its writer Rob Shearman. I'm only at the start. So far there has been a very Shearman-esque chapter which I'm guessing is Dalek POV, and then something more straightforward as we got into the story.

Listening: I recently discovered that there is a Target Book Club podcast that is reading its way through the Target Novelisations. I'm currently listening to their thoughts on Planet of Giants which they recorded back in 2017. It's interesting, though also irritating in places, partly because they are American and sometimes I just want to tell them stuff, and sometimes because, I don't know, a lot of the discussion seems to buy into accepted wisdom about what parts of the show are good and what bad and so on that's rooted in conversations people had in the 1990s, not conversations people have now, and sometimes because of, I suppose, confusions around what is in the original story and what is in the novel. I feel it is a little harsh to criticise someone novelising a TV story for poor plotting in the source material. I do quite like it though, I just wish it felt a bit more as though it was coming from a place of love.

Watching: I have a vague plan to continue watching through Hawkeye, now himself is away. For some, unaccountable, reason himself is less interested in Jeremy Renner in leathers, shooting arrows, than I am. However, so far, I've mostly been playing catch-up with various chores. Perhaps at the weekend, though there are two big work things I need to get done and dusted before then, otherwise I'll be doing them at the weekend.

Reading: I'm currently reading The Outskirter's Secret, the second book in the Steerswoman series. I'm not enjoying it as much as the first - I'm about a third of the way through and so far it has mostly been travelogue, which is fine, but I'd like a little more to drive the story. I've also just read my Primeval Secret Santa gift from fredbassett. It's another entry in a series of Claudia/Ryan stories she first started writing for me a while back and very much to my taste, though you have to be quite tolerant of magic in your Primeval stories to enjoy it. The Green Knight: Part 1 and Part 2. The rest of the series is up on AO3 as The Inglestone Chronicles.

Listening: I'm horribly backed up on podcast listening, thanks to the general lack of running. I'm about up to the Verity and Radio Free Skaro episodes on the Doctor Who series finale. I'm listening to episodes of The Economist podcast from November (possibly I should skip ahead).

Watching: I've started watching the Hawkeye series. Some of it is a lot of fun, but I'm finding Kate Bishop rather irritating which I don't think was intended. I'd like for her to stop being the comic relief.

Reading: Just finished a Pat Cadigan omnibus by reading Tea from an Empty Cup. I'm sure this was very exciting in the early days of Cyberpunk, but read now it feels like it is a bit too invested in the possibilities of an AR setting at the expense of plot. Just started Doctor Who: Scratchman: Jury out.

Listening: Sticky Notes on William L. Dawnson's Negro Folk Symphony - my sympathies were with Joshua Weilerstein trying to navigate discussing the music in the composer's (strongly) preferred terms while accounting for modern sensibilities.

Watching: We've been watching Fate Zero which himself has seen before but I have not. Highly recommended to Arthurians (at least those with a tolerance for Anime) not so much for the way it incorporates the wide-ranging Arthur myth (which, in fact, it largely ignores - at least so far) but more for how it uses Arthur as a symbol for a particular viewpoint on Kingship and heroism (contrasted with Alexander the Great, Gilgamesh and Diarmuid Ua Duibhne).

Reading: A Local Habitation by Seanan McGuire - I read the first Toby Daye novel last year (I think, maybe the year before) and initially sort of bounced off it a bit, but then when I treated it as a story in its own right rather than a Whodunnit, I got more into it. This one is more straightforwardly Whodunnity. I'm not necessarily raving about it, but I like the fact that the protagonist owns her various failings and errors, and I'm curious to know who the culprit is.

Listening: I've been listening to the episodes of Toby Hadoake's podcast that are not commentary (a fairly small number). Today's was on words that Doctor Who has taught us in which, among other things, I learned I've been mispronouncing Gillat (as in Gary Gillat) for at least a decade.

Watching: Just now, Blakes' 7, but I can recommend the Netflix Lupin series. I think of it as Lupin gets the Sherlock treatment, but its very much its own thing and has a different premise for the modern take.

Reading: A Lady of Quality by Georgette Heyer. I've never read any Georgette Heyer though I've seen various members of this parish enthuse about her. I appealed some years ago to claraste who sent me a short list of recommendations. I've no idea if the list was in any particular order, but this was the first one on it. claraste labelled it "determined spinster". My initial thoughts were that there were an awful lot of info dumps delivered via flashback, and quite a lot of long dialogue sections doing much the same. Then I realised I wanted to know what happened next...

Listening: The usual really. I made Mum listen to podcasts while we drove which at least has caused me to catch up. I don't think she was impressed, even when I removed the more Who-ish ones from the list (possibly this was a mistake, the others, at least at the moment, are all a bit Radio 4 serious business-ish).

Watching: Ms. Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries which B. discovered while acquiring Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears for me as a birthday present. It's a clever idea - modernising the Miss Fisher concept to the 1960s - another decade with a distinctive style. Peregrine Fisher is just different enough from Phryne Fisher to be interesting in her own right, and the set up - in which she is aided and abetted by the Adventuresses Club set up by Phryne allows her to be less of an all-rounder. The clone of Jack Robinson, however, is sufficiently clone-like that I've already forgotten his name. The stories are full of 1960s style but feel slightly too languorous at their 90 minute length. I'm not familiar enough with Australian culture to comment on racism (a criticism levelled at the Miss Fisher series and the books it is based on), but so far the only Italians have been mafiosi or associated with mafiosi and I don't think I've seen anyone else who isn't whiter than white so I suspect it isn't doing a lot better. Still, it's fun on its own terms.

Reading: Still Gutsy Women by the Clintons. Lots of it is interesting in a "bite size" kind of a way, though I am finding its relentlessly US, if not Clinton, centric focus a bit irritating. It's got to the point where its kind of refreshing if they discuss a woman one or other of them hasn't met in person.

Listening: Most recently, Reality Bomb, wherein Graeme Burk is wrong about both animations and reconstructions of missing episodes. Though he's also correct that it would be nice to have alternative versions of some of these that were more expensively animated and more tightly edited, just to see what they looked like or for viewing when one wants something straightforwardly entertaining where one doesn't have to make allowances for serialised television in the 1960s.

Watching: Mysterious Cities of Gold and Ge ge ge no Kitaro. It's probably fair to say that, even more so than normal, we're not engaging with the realities of life.