thoughts on cable

[auntiemeesh]

I'm in a chatty mood today. Must be that caffeine I failed to avoid a collision with a little while ago. So I'll just spam you all with random nonsense.

I finally got around to ordering Lost - the complete first season, and it should arrive on the seventeenth. If they ever get around to shipping it. That always seems to be the biggest hurdle. Now I'm trying to figure out the best way of being able to see the new season when it starts up in a couple of weeks. The best thing to do, of course, is go ahead and get cable. I just looked into the options here in Berlin and I'm not happy. There is no regular cable here, as far as I can tell, only digital, and digital is still a pretty expensive way to go. I may have to do that anyway, but I hate to spend so much money every month for just a few tv shows (Lost, Stargate SG1 and Atlantis, BSG). There may be another cable company around here that has a more basic package, but this is a very small area and it seems unlikely they'd be able to support two cable companies.

I do get ABC (sort of) without cable. It's the only channel that I've been able to get any reception on, and it's not great. Add to that the fact that I won't yet be home from work when Lost starts so I'll have to tape it, and the quality of my VCR isn't great, even starting with perfectly clear images. I'm not sure what I'd get off a tape recorded from the minimal reception I get. So that's not a very good option.

The third option is to find someone who'd be willing to tape it for me, but that gets a bit elaborate. eve11 is currently taping SciFi Fridays for me and I don't want to add to what she's already doing, and it just starts to get a bit ridiculous, trying to set up a network of people spread out across the country taping various tv shows for me, lol.

I suppose I'm going to have to give in to the outrageousness of the cable company if I want to be able to see my shows, and I *do* want to be able to see my shows. *sigh* There goes all my hard earned money.

On Sunday evening, while I was in Pippin costume and hanging out with the Scarran, someone who was taking pictures of us together suggested that it would be really cool to write a cross-over fic in which the Scarrans, while searching wormholes for Earth, found Middle-earth instead. Then, when I got home, one of the first things my sister said to me, possibly while we were still in the airport, was that I should write a fic in which it was a couple of hundred years in the future, hobbits had come out of hiding and were in space. She has this great image of hobbits in lycra 'trekkie' outfits, flying their spaceships around. Then, last night at the coffee shop, whiling away the empty hours, I was thinking about Battlestar Galactica and how the producers of the new show decided to reimagine the old, rather than continue it. So then my thoughts drifted to LotR and how it would look if it was reimagined today, or some time in the future. I put all three of these ideas together, and now I have this sort of AU, sort-of-cross-overish fic thing swimming in my mind, demanding that I write it. I don't know if I'll ever actually get to it, but the ideas that I have started to formulate are giving me all sorts of giggle fits. I'm thinking this might be a fun project to work on tonight and tomorrow in my few precious non-working hours of the week. :D

While I was at the Philadelphia airport, waiting close to three hours for my connecting flight to Pittsburgh last week, I realized I'd forgotten to bring a book with me, so I hotfooted it to one of the magazine stores and checked out their selection. Pretty pathetic, with maybe twenty titles all told. In desperation, I picked up a copy of Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown. Not being a hermit living in a cave, I've naturally heard a lot of hype about The Da Vinci Code and had decided early on that I was staying well away from it. I have this knee-jerk reaction to anything that gets too much hype, because it's almost never good enough to really merit so much attention. Anyway, not having many other options, I picked up Angels and Demons and started to read it. Even with my previous experiences of overly hyped items not living up to expectations, I must say I was very disappointed at how poorly done it was.

The writing itself is fine in a purely technical sense and the core idea of the story is interesting (although I understand that all his later books follow the same idea, thus making it rather less interesting after a while), but the characterizations are very heavy-handed. It seemed to me to be something rather like an artist getting an idea for something very grand, like the Sistine chapel or something, and then attempting to execute it with crayons. It doesn't matter how well conceived the idea is, it's going seem a bit crude. That's how this felt, like he had this great idea, but then spoiled it by making such stereotypical characters and allowing them to fall into very stereotypical situations in the course of attempting to resolve the crisis.

Now, to be fair, I'm less than half-way through the book so maybe it gets better further along, but I have a feeling it won't. I'm going to try to wade through it because I hate leaving a book unfinished, but it's definitely not on my priority list. I'm curious, though, to know if any of you read it and what you thought of it, whether you thought it was great, awful or somewhere in between.

I did warn you, didn't I, that this post was going to be full of randomness?

Comments

[ansostuff.livejournal.com]

I`ve read Dan Brown, starting with the Da Vinci Code and then Angels And Deamons. I liked it but it is like you say - a grand scheme that doesn`t really fills out properly. I found the Da Vinci Code very interesting and exciting as a novel, and Angels And Deamons too, but he shouldn`t write any more of that kind of books I think.

Oh, and you looked great like Pip, I forgot to say, but I looked at the pictures! :D

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

you looked great like Pip, I forgot to say,

Thank you! It's funny because I spent months working on the Chiana outfit and then when I saw the pictures of it, all I could think was that I looked terrible in it. I spent considerably less time and toil on the Pippin outfit and I thought it looked great. Go figure, lol!

Btw, I love your new icon, with Merry's costume details. Where did you get the images, if you don't mind my asking?

[ansostuff.livejournal.com]

You looked good in both!

The details are from pictures downloaded from theonering.net`s scrapbook under Merry. Isn`t it wonderful? I would so much like that costuem! :D

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

I saw your icon and immediately thought, if I could get that much detail for the whole outfit, I could make a fantastic costume for next year, lol. However, I think the stitching and metal working and the richness of the required fabric are all good reasons to take a step back and just say no. ;)

[dcdiva.livejournal.com]

That's the odd thing about Dan Brown books. I started with Angels and Demons, and moved on to DaVinci Code and his other two books. While reading them, I fully recognized that they weren't really fabulously written, yet I couldn't put them down. I have fairly intelligent, well-read friends who are inexplicably hooked on trashy romance novels, which I could never understand. But I think these are like, Trashy Adventure Novels. Easy to follow, and non-stop...but certainly not deserving of the Nobel for Literature.

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

I think I've spent too much time in fandoms where characterizations were done really well. I love adventure stories and I really don't demand great literature, but I've become very demanding about good character development and presentation. If that's lacking I have a hard time getting around it to enjoy the story, sadly.

[dcdiva.livejournal.com]

Yeah...it's pretty hard after you've been spoiled :-P

[birch-tree.livejournal.com]

She has this great image of hobbits in lycra 'trekkie' outfits
heheeeeee!!! I had a kind of similar idea for a little sketch I made for Shirebound
:DDDDDDDD
I hope you can actually write your "trekkie hobbits" project! I am sure it will be great fun!

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

It deserves images. Too bad I can't draw. I'll have to send scenes off to pipwise and other folks who've proven themselves good at drawing and beg them for images of hobbits in lycra, lol. :D

[grey-wonderer.livejournal.com]

The new fiction idea sounds very entertaining. I like the idea of something different. I hope you are able to work it all out. As to the cable issue, we have those here too. We are down in between the mountians so we get no reception without cable and the cable company knows this very well. They charge dearly for digital and so we only have regular cable even though some of the shows that I would love to get are only available on digital. Everyone keeps telling me that we should try to get satilite but I haven't explored that idea yet.

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

I've heard that satellite is pretty unreliable (of course, I've heard this through the cable commericials, so I don't know how true it is). I'm going to call the cable company tomorrow and find out what sort of non-digital packages they have.

[westwindschild.livejournal.com]

I don't know how satellite is in the mountains, but we really don't have a problem with it. DB sometimes loses his signal when wind or rain kicks up, but with all the interference on the phone and the cable lines at his house, satellite is still an improvement. On ours, the picture sometimes freezes for half a second, similar to when the magnets are going bad on a dvd player, but we have to have gale force winds or really dense cloud cover before we lose signal.

Love the idea of Trekkie hobbits - I may have to play with that one myself. Score one to Lyda_Pearl!

[whtmtnwmn.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you'll get the cable thing straightened out on Monday. Hopefully they'll be quick about it too, so you can enjoy sci-fi Fridays once again. I doubt they'll make you get digital--the standard package should be enough.

I see I'm in the minority here, but I have to confess that I did enjoy Angels & Demons and Da Vinci Code. Sorry... I found the storyline very creative, and the depth of research astounding. Of course I'm afraid of the butchering it'll undergo in the upcoming movie tho. I mean, really, Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon?! You've got to be kidding?!

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

I called this morning to get the cable set up. You would not believe how much they tried to charge me, just for standard non-digital cable. Luckily, I whined and complained and they admitted they have a special going which is ten dollars cheaper for the first twelve months, which brought the price down to what I think is just within the high end of acceptable, lol. And then they can't even get here until the end of next week, so I still had to go find someone to tape Lost for me next week. Thank goodness for lj friends, lol.

[westwindschild.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Angels and Demons yet. I really enjoyed The Da Vinci Code; I thought the characters were pretty well developed and the conspiracy angle had me completely hooked. It was one of those books that I couldn't put down till I was finished. Several months ago, LP sent me Virtual Fortress, and it wasn't nearly as good - sort of a cardboard cutout of Da Vinci. Same characters with different names; same plot with a different conspiracy; same conclusions to be drawn at the end. While Da Vince seemed very well written to me, Fortress was not. I won't be reading any more Dan Brown, most likely, but I'm glad I read Da Vinci. If you had read it first, I think you would have liked it.

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

The thing about The Da Vinci Code is that it comes after Angels and Demons and it's the same story, according to Lyda Pearl and other folks who've read both, as you said for Virtual Fortress. And the problem for me with the characters isn't that they aren't developed, it's how they're presented. We learn almost everything there is to know about them right up front, and to me they don't seem like real people at all, they seem very archtypical. I guess I just prefer characters who are a little more human and a little more real feeling, even if the situations they are put in are not very real. That's what makes a good story for me.