pedanther

1. Our season of short plays has opened and closed, with positive responses from the people who came to see it. We got a good write-up in the local paper, both in the sense that the reviewer liked it and in the sense that everyone's names were spelled right and it didn't give away too many of the good surprises. (If I'd been directing one of the other plays, I'd have been annoyed about some of the moments chosen for the accompanying photo spread, but fortunately my own play was immune to being spoiled in that manner.) The reviewer said that of the three plays the one I directed was his favourite, which I'm inclined to attribute to the quality of the script, and showed the best acting, which I'm prepared to take some credit for.

After it was over, I spent about a week not stirring from home except to go to work and band practice, and I'm not letting myself get roped into any more theatrical productions until June.


2. We've had the second round of the Toastmasters speech evaluation contest, with winners from three club contests competing against each other. This year, for the first time, I was competing as a winner of a club contest. I didn't win the area contest, but I'm not too bothered; just getting there was an achievement, and anyway I wouldn't have been able to make it to the third round, the division contest, this weekend, so I wouldn't have advanced any further regardless. The winner of the division contest will go on to compete in the final round at the District Convention in early June. (Which I'm on the organising committee for, and that's another reason I'm not committing to any more theatre before then.)


3. The final season of Foyle's War aired here recently - at least, they say it's the final season, but they've said that before. More than once. The war that the title theoretically refers to ended two final seasons ago, not that I'm complaining. (At least it hasn't become one of those wartime series where the war drags on longer than it did in reality so they can fit more seasons in; that trick only works if the series is set vaguely "during the war", and Foyle's War has always been tied to specific historical events, which is one of the things I like about it.) I'm actually really glad we got this final season, because it leaves us in a much better place than the last final season did; not entirely happy, but considerably more hopeful.


4. One of the things I like about reading fanfic is that it can offer new ways of looking at things that one might not have thought of before.

For instance, I recently read a Doctor Who fic that starts with a fresh look at "The End of Time", Ten's regeneration reluctance, and the extended companion farewell tour, through the lens of "The Time of the Doctor":

He doesn't want to go.

Coward, the Master called him, and maybe it's true, because he's terrified. Imagine him, of all people, frightened of change. But it's different this time. Twelve regenerations to a Time Lord, and the last one may have been non-standard, but it counts, and so does the one he tries to tell himself wasn't really him. He can feel the evidence inside him, irrefutable: some vital part of him busy using itself up.

Twelve regenerations, and he's just shoved the only people capable of giving him more back into their time lock. So this is the last time he'll ever experience this, and he's not going to go gentle. No, this last time, Death is going to have a fight on its hands.

He knows what he wants to do with the time he has left, and he has to do it now, because there's no telling how much time he'll have left, after. And no telling what kind of man he'll become.

So he visits them, one by one: the people he's loved, the people he's failed to do right by.

The fic is And at the End, a Garden by AstroGirl, and the rest of it is good too.


5. Video link of the month: John Oliver presents: Infrastructure: The Movie

"You cannot tell me that you are not interested in this, because every summer people flock to see our infrastructure threatened by terrorists or aliens, but we should care just as much when it's under threat from the inevitable passage of time. The problem is, no one has made a blockbuster movie about the importance of routine maintenance and repair. Or they hadn't - until now..."

(If you want to skip straight to the hypothetical action movie, that begins at 17:10. The preamble is worth sitting through if you have the time, though.)

Fiction books
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Local Custom (re-read)

In progress
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Scout's Progress (re-read)
Gail Carson Levine. Ella Enchanted (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. Trickster's Queen

Non-fiction books in progress
Joachim Fest. Plotting Hitler's Death

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Ellen Raskin. The Westing Game

1. The Only Connect season final was won by the team I'd been barracking for, a group of SF geeks and Eurogame enthusiasts. Yay! (Though I was a bit disappointed when they were flummoxed by the question seeking the connection between "gale", "peel", and "king". I thought that was fairly obvious.)


2. The latest season of Foyle's War has finally started airing here. Yay! I was amused to recognise Frank Shaw, DCS Foyle's former assistant in the subplot of the season opener, as Steve Turner, DC Crabbe's assistant in one of my other favourite British detective series, Pie in the Sky.


3. The latest season of Sherlock and the latest whatever-it-is (I think technically it's the back half of the first season, or something) of Agents of SHIELD have not started airing here yet. I was going to say I'm not sure I care, but obviously I care enough to think it's worth mentioning.


4. Meanwhile, I have been watching old episodes of Doctor Who. Yay! The ABC's episode synopses for Classic Who are a bit of a mixed bag: some of them are unremarkable, some of them are clearly ripped off from the BBC's official web site (to interesting effect, because what the BBC's official web site has are not in fact episode synopses), and then occasionally there's something like this: "The Doctor and Ace join the Brigadier in a battle against warriors from another dimension. They also discover that pub prices are outrageous."


5. A few years ago, there was a thing going around where people wrote program guides for fictional TV shows: describing the premise, listing the cast, and so on into however much detail the individual author felt like. (One of the ones that got my hypothetical vote for Show I Would So Watch If It Were Real, ironychan's Mammoth Season, ended up with detailed descriptions of each episode, a fair amount of meta about the popular fanon, and an account of the show's troubled production which led to it being cancelled halfway through the intended story arc and ultimately wrapped up as a Dark Horse comic book miniseries.)

Anyway, the reason I mention it again now is that recently, while looking for something else, I stumbled across a good one that I somehow missed at the time: Shivers, as described by innerbrat, is an intriguing adventure show with the high concept "Lesbian Vampire Killers: as in, they're lesbians who kill vampires (and other monsters)". One nice thing about it is that the cast has a high level of diversity - apart from a good gender balance and representation of varied sexualities, as one might expect from the premise, it also does well at ethnic diversity and has a major supporting character with a non-defining disability. (The obligatory wise old mentor character is a cantankerous old woman, played by Stephanie Cole, who is a wheelchair user. And also has a walking stick, because there are situations where a walking stick is more suitable than a wheelchair, and vice versa.)

Sam Stewart had nothing whatever to do with the murder this week. Maybe she isn't the long-lost ancestor of Jessica Fletcher after all.

Since my first proper post on LJ was to complain that there was nothing interesting on TV on Sunday nights (which, for complicated historical reasons, is the only time I watch TV), balance perhaps requires me to mention that right now the Sunday night pickings are pretty good.

The new season of Doctor Who started a little while ago (only a few weeks behind the UK, for a change). Yesterday was the first part of the "Time of Angels" two-parter; I'm looking forward to part two.

Also yesterday was the first episode of the new season of Foyle's War - which is interesting, because the previous season was supposed to be the last, and finished with the War ending and the cast splitting up. Not that I am complaining at all, mind. (Although I do wonder if they're going to have to resort to outlandish coincidences to get Sam Stewart involved every week, now that she's not Foyle's official sidekick any more. This week she happened to be the one who found the body, which did nicely, but that's the kind of thing that you can only really do once.)