pedanther: (teevee)
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, [livejournal.com profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.)
pedanther: (cheerful)
1. My Re-Reading Liad project continues, although lately it's been kind of lonely: all the people who had been reading and commenting along disappeared when we hit Trade Secret and temporarily switched from re-reading to reading-the-latest-novel-for-the-first-time. (Trade Secret is a prequel, so it slots in partway through the sequence rather than tagging on the end.) I guess some of them didn't want to read it for the first time on a chapter-per-day schedule. For that matter, some of them might just plain not have had access to a copy of the book yet. Anyhow, I hope some of them come back when we start the next novel, Local Custom, tomorrow.

2. I've also been doing some re-watching lately: after the Doctor Who 50th anniversary, I decided to re-watch the very first Doctor Who serial, "An Unearthly Child", and then a serial from each of the other classic Doctors in turn. For the second and third Doctors, I watched "The Tomb of the Cybermen" and "The Ambassadors... of Death" respectively -- aka the first two of the three Doctor Who stories in which Cyril Shaps plays a nervous doomed scientist. For better or worse, I had to miss "Planets of the Spiders" (nervous doomed scientist #3) and "The Androids of Tara" (Cyril Shaps' final turn on the show, this time as a priest in a very memorable hat). I haven't decided yet what I'll do after I reach the Eighth Doctor: continue on into the new series, or take a detour into the Big Finish audios?

3. The only new TV I'm following at the moment, week-to-week, is the BBC Four quiz show Only Connect, which involves teams finding connections between arbitrary-seeming sets of clues. The series final is next week; I'm barracking for a team of geeks called The Board Gamers, who are united by what has been variously described in the intros as "a passion of Pictionary" and "a mania for Monopoly", but is actually an interest that tends more toward Eurogames and similar.

4. A few weeks ago, I spent a day tromping around the bush with my elder brother, helping out with an annual wildlife survey. Specifically, mallee fowl, which are shy and retiring creatures, but build large and easy-to-count nesting sites. It was an experience, and the impressive burn I got on the inside of my wrist has pretty much healed by now. (I actually did a pretty good job with the sunblock, but I may have skimped somewhat on the undersides of my arms -- not having realised that I'd be in charge of the GPS unit, and consequently spending most of the day with one arm held out in front of me underside-up.)

5. I have an American quarter in my wallet. It's smaller than I expected, about the same size, shape and colour as an Australian 10-cent coin (which is what the cashier who gave it to me thought it was).

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