pedanther

1. So, a new year.

My new year's resolution last year was to make some progress on figuring out what I want to do with my life, prompted by the realisation that I was about to qualify for long service leave in the job I took temporarily after university until I decided out what I really wanted to do.

I've achieved it, kind of. I still don't really know what I want to do with my life, but I do know where I want to be in two years from now, which is more than I've managed before. Conveniently, it's geographically the same place I am now, but at least I have a positive reason for wanting to be here instead of just drifting along in the direction I was already going. And the nature of the reason is suggestive of what I might want from life, so there's room for further development there.

I don't have a formal resolution this year, just an intention to keep on with last year's, with a side order of getting back on the wagons I've fallen off with respect to morning-ness and exercise and suchlike.


2. Boy, it's hot. I've been spending large portions of the day inside, with the blinds drawn against the nuclear-powered fury of the sun, reading Yuletide fics and playing online games.


3. Speaking of Yuletide, author's names have now been revealed, resulting in the discovery that two of the fics that particularly impressed me this year were both written by the same author, RecessiveJean, who furthermore has written two more fics as well, for a total of four excellent fics, in six fandoms. (Captain America, The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Jurassic Park, Narnia, The Rocketeer, The Scarlet Pimpernel. So yes, that means at least one superficially-unworkable crossover.)

T-Rex was in Kentucky, although he didn’t know it. He hadn’t brought a map, and if he had, he probably would have tried to eat it by now, anyway.


4. Speaking of online games, I've reached the final story arc in Doctor Who: Worlds in Time. The Doctor has traced the source of the time disturbances back to the planet Skaro - which, as he points out, is a disturbance in itself, since Skaro is supposed to be utterly destroyed.

The new iDaleks look even less threatening as two-dimensional cartoons than they did in "Victory of the Daleks", incidentally.


5. Lady Spy, Gentleman Explorer: the life of Herbert Dyce Murphy sounded promising, but I had to give up on it before the end of the fourth chapter.

The first strike against the book is that it's a work of non-fiction written as if it were a novel, studded with details the author couldn't possibly have known about what the people involved did and thought on such-and-such an occasion. To be fair, some of these are marked as supposition, but that just draws attention to the places where the author did the same thing without marking it. And it prompts one to consider whether the supposition adds anything to the account, to which my answer was generally negative.

The third strike is that on top of being written like a novel, it's such a twee novel. It's all very comfortable and superficial; despite supposedly being real people, they've got (or at least are granted by the author) less depth and complication than many fictional characters I've known. The point where I gave up was when I realised that the author had somehow managed to make the story of a man who lived as a woman in Victorian England dull.

So much for the style. Are the underlying facts any good? Well...

The second strike was awarded to a ten-word parenthesis that single-handedly destroyed my faith in the author's fact-checking. The author reports that when Murphy was living in Oxford and preparing to enter the University, he was tutored by a man named Montgomery Bell, "said to be the original of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes".