New house, new frustrations

I can only hope I may be forgiven for neglecting to post anything last week. Rest assured that it was not that my life had finally become so boring that I gave up on telling anyone about it. Actually, I’ve been moving, and now I have moved. This week has been my first week after the move, dealing with unpacking, chores, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to in a new house. Or rather, an old house, as this place may be older than the Hedgehog House was. Not that that is a complaint. The house has a great deal of character in the non-euphemistic sense—perhaps the word is “charm”—and in spite of appearances about as much room as could be wished for. And holy cow, the yard. I might actually go outside sometimes.

Not that the past week hasn’t given me any stories. The new neighborhood reminds Girlfriend and me of Seattle, and as we have discovered, old houses in Seattle and Seattle-like environments attract two things: us and spiders. We have had fun discovering that there are keys that modern hardware stores cannot reproduce, cut as they are from obsolete shapes, meaning that there are exactly two keys to this house and until we replace the locks there will apparently never be any more.

My deepest sorrow of late has been discovering the downside of splitting utilities with the other half of our duplex: this morning I found most of the internet replaced with a gentle alert from our service provider that we had been cut off, for reasons discoverable only to a person with the network information, i.e., the people who live downstairs, but are currently elsewhere.

Surely this would be cause to panic, or at least take urgent action, if I were not still somehow* still allowed to access my e-mail and Elance.com, meaning I am still open for business.

And for all that, I’m still happy with this place.

Speaking, incidentally, of people’s houses, on Wednesday night Girlfriend and I saw Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing (which, in case my segue was too obscure, was filmed at chez Whedon). After much confusion and some false starts, I might add—we’d been trying to find a showtime since the movie ostensibly “opened” on June 7.

I think anyone who can tolerate my writing is well-situated to enjoy this Much Ado. I think I will dare to call it my favorite version, of three I have seen, although I reserve the right to say Bryan Bender remains my favorite Benedick and lord it over anyone who didn’t see him at Tacoma Little Theater when they had the chance. And surely Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson had better chemistry than this pair, and Branagh’s version has this and that, here and there, to recommend it over Whedon’s. (Whedon, for example, omits my favorite line of the whole play.**) But as for the whole movie working, and the absence of weak spots, for my personal criterion of everyone at all times knowing what the words coming out of their mouths mean, I think this recent one is the winner.

* I’ve sort of figured out how, and I’m using that knowledge to get to my blog. I had really hoped that by the time you read this my problem would, ipso facto, have been solved, but that is not the case.

** But truly, for mine own part, if I were as tedious as a king, I could find it in my heart to bestow it all of your worship.

Cyborg zombies are still the best cyborgs, and the best zombies

I feel like I should apologize for last week's weaksauce post. I've actually felt a little guilty about every non-robot pageview I've gotten this week; I'm sad because I disappointed all the humans and wasted their time. Not that I should get into the habit of apologizing to the internet.

As I said before, I've gotten back to watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I haven't been exercising the kind of arc discipline that I would have used watching Buffy or The Walking Dead, but ST:TNG doesn't enforce that kind of linearity the same way, either. It's actually kind of weird going back to an older show like this, after watching so many more recent dramas driven by season-long plot arcs, and find it of little consequence what order I watch the episodes in. The show's cozy status quo is as quaint as its 4:3 aspect ratio.

We skipped to Season 2, and skipped some of the lamer episodes there (though we blundered headlong into The Child, perhaps the lamest episode of them all!), and then on a whim jumped a season from the Borg's first appearance to "Best of Both Worlds."

It was interesting to watch the show face down futility, in light of the bleak, modern fare I've been watching. The relentless pressure of the apocalypse makes for good television, but not varied television. When TNG put the human race in danger, or seriously threatened a main character's life, it was special. (Though it occurred to me that if Joss Whedon had been at the helm, he would have had Jonathan Frakes re-record "Space... the final frontier" for Part 2.) TNG may only have visited the place where Battlestar Galactica lived, but I appropriately get the sense of the Enterprise actually flying around the galaxy from one kind of adventure to another.

I loved the Borg as a villain when I was young, and the way they were on TNG will always be the way they "really" are to me--before the Borg Queen deflated the ominous hivemind, before they got demystified and played out and tenderized. Looking back, it's actually interesting to see how much of what defined them wasn't there in their first appearance in "Q Who?" The words "Resistance is futile" were yet to be uttered. Assimilation was not mentioned or hinted at--I didn't even realize until Girlfriend pointed it out, but when [spoilers], that's actually the first indication that they have that ability. It makes me wonder if the writers knew what they had back in Season 2, or if they even had it, or if they only came up with the most important elements later.

The contrast between "Q Who?" and "Best of Both Worlds" is informative. Perhaps most importantly, the former spends about half its time telling us how scared we should be of the Borg. The latter spends its time better by having them do progressively scarier things, and giving the characters some time to be scared. It's a lesson I hope I can remember if I ever have as good an idea to work with.

A pretty boring post

The truth is, I feel obligated to write a post here before I go to bed, but this has been a pretty boring weekend. I've started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation again, and that's as good as it is.