Meditations on the Abyss
Today was a frantic day at work. One of our newer customers is testing a brand new element of our system, and they're having a bunch of trouble. Some of it is legitimate trouble, the result of not having had enough time to do the first pass of development properly. Some of it is the result of just "bad luck", meaning strange things are happening that make it look worse than it is, and when we delve into what's really happening, it's something like someone recompiling a whole bunch of source code at an inopportune time.
Anyway, since I'm most familiar with the system, I ended up doing a set of emergency fixes today which we shipped to them tonight and we'll (read: I'll) work with them tomorrow to get them installed. A second set of fixes will probably go out this week or next. But working on tight deadlines like this always gets my adrenaline going; I get a little wigged out, work and talk at a very high speed, and suddenly the term "seat-of-the-pants programming" makes sense to me.
It's not an experience I like very much, although it always has a mild interest in retrospect. But the feeling of being rushed like that is usually a sign that I'm operating more out of instinct than consideration.
So I was pretty frazzled when I got home, and was even bummed that this week's comics shipment is delayed 'til tomorrow due to Memorial Day.
Also, IE4 managed to hang my Mac when I quit from it, and I couldn't figure out why. It also seems to be a bigger memory hog than Netscape.
"Meditations on the Abyss" was a filler episode. It sets up Lennier's mission with the Rangers (presumably so that he'll end up betraying them somehow), but the rest of that plot thread is utterly predictable in this episode. Yawn! And that whiny Minbari he befriends; yuck!
The Garibaldi scene at the end, where he's rolling drunk on the floor, was utterly gratuitous, and should have been excised from the episode entirely. Showing stuff like that without actually advancing the story is a waste of time. Straczynski's scripts are much more effective when he has just one or two plots in an episode, and moves each one either to completion or to a new stage of being. He's only effective at multiple plot threads in "big bang" episodes when a lot of stuff is coming to a head all at once.
Only the Londo/Vir stuff in this episode was really worth much, and then only as comic relief. Well, okay, the Franklin/G'Kar stuff was mildly interesting, although I cringed at the poor way they simulated removing and inserting G'Kar's eye; it looked so fake!
I hope things pick up over the next three weeks; I felt rather cheated having to wait six weeks just for this.
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