24 February 1998: One Square Forward

Tuesday, 24 February 1998:

One Square Forward

Things are continuing to be sort of medium, or maybe medium-rare. Something like that. I'm not feeling too inspired tonight, but let's see what I can come up with.

First, the ubiquitous James informs me that "naff" means pretty much the same thing as "duff", and that "duff" may in fact be American, not Brit, slang. I think the ubiquitous James is also a bit cheesed that I haven't answered his e-mail lately. Soon!

I hope.

The real problem with an on-line journal is that I can't always plead that I've been incredibly busy as a reason for why I haven't written. Suddenly, my life is accountable. Phooey.

The more I watch season two of Babylon 5 the more I realize that season one actually holds up better over time. With hindsight, we can see that there really were many crummy season two episodes.

Actually, "Hunter, Prey" is better than I'd remembered, more tense than it had seemed at first. It seemed kind of ordinary the first time it aired, but maybe just by contrast with its contemporaries it seems a little better. Tony Steedman as Dr. Everett Jacobs was quite charming, too.

On the other hand, Peter David's "And There All The Honor Lies" is pretty much a waste of time, especially since Straczynski tacked (and I do mean tacked) that lousy Babearlon 5 thing onto the end of it (hey, JMS? Uh, I hate to break it to you, but there's no air in space!). It's full of Peter David tacking on out-of-character one-liners onto the cast, and otherwise moving us through a story that doesn't serve a lot of purpose, being basically a different take on "Revelations". Ack.

Oh, and the silly "Sheridan learning stuff" thread, which gives us "one moment of perfect beauty": Christian-sounding chants from an alien on a space station, apparently. A good example of why trying to represent "perfect anything" in fiction is asking for trouble.

It's kind of amusing at the coffee shop how many of the people behind the counter (what does one call them, exactly? They're not waitrons) know what I order when I go there. I threw them last night by ordering a single mocha rather than a double (no whip), but mostly I order the same thing. I do that with my eating habits generally; I get into eating or drinking one thing, or a small set of things, and stick with it until I get tired of it.

Some of the people there might be surprised some of the things about them I've soaked up from stray conversions over the last few years. I must know the names of half the staff by now. I can really be pretty deadly when it comes to the rumor mill; I pick up all kinds of information, have an uncanny talent that I don't understand for persuading people to tell me things (actually I think it's less persuasion than that people seem to trust me, don't ask me why!, and I rarely forget such things. Very strange, especially since I tend to feel that my social skills were weak to start with and are decaying rapidly these days.

I won another eBay auction today, finally picking up a Marvel Masterworks hardcover I've been trying to nail down for a while, for less than cover price. Nice! Need to send off the check as soon as I can.

This is kind of dull, isn't it? I don't really have much of interest in my life to report lately. This kind of bothers me, but I'm not sure why, since overall I'm more comfortable with how things stand than I have been in a while.

Unless I've only finally succeeded in fooling myself.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)