Test 1, 2, 3.

What if a job that would be very good for me career-wise is turning out to be not so good for me health-wise and I haven't even gotten there yet?

And I don't necessarily feel comfortable replying to individual posts by strangers on tumblr, but I do want to write up my general thoughts.

The main issue I was encountering was the idea that asexuals are not LGBT and shouldn't be foisting themselves into LGBT spaces. Which I certainly agree with as I am neither Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, nor Transgender.
(However, if someone is using one of the longer alphabet soups, like LGBTQIA, I am going to assume I'm included because the 'A' does stand for 'Asexual' and not 'Ally'.)

Another point of contention was the split attraction model, which on the one hand, I am not inclined to disparage because obviously a lot of people find it helpful, but on the other evil hand, it would be kind of nice to have asexual be defined the same way the other prefix-sexual words are, which is to say encompassing sexual and romantic attraction.
(It's not that it's some big imposition to say aromantic asexual, so much as that it doesn't follow the established rules for what a prefix-sexuality is, and that makes things more confusing and potentially more difficult to mainstream?)

And then the above concerns kind of dovetail into a repeated assertion that I saw multiple people express that if you're not an LGBT ace, you are therefore a cishet ace. And I feel the need for like, a stage-whispered, "AHEM, There Is An Option You Are Forgetting." Because I may not be LGBT, and I am cis, but I'm not hetero-anything.
(And probably part of my frustration with this is that at one point in my life I defaulted myself into the heteronormativity category because despite my reasonably liberal upbringing, I was not exposed to not-being-attracted-to-anyone-of-any-gender-at-all-ever as an option.)

Early Season 5 includes Shatner vs. TheThingOnTheWing and the Talky Tina episode.

I ended on The Old Man in the Cave-- I could never quite figure out why they'd be more upset that he's a machine than some random old dude. Like the computer would be more likely to be accurate and less likely to lie because he wants the food for himself.

Next year starts with Uncle Simon.

We have traveled far from your New Jersey birthplace, Mr. Boots.
Here's to another 8 years (and hopefully even more than that)!

They always focus on the electronic aspect of SHIELD's record-keeping, but there's got to be a physical Archive somewhere (because paper backup that's why)(also because digitization will never quite capture the mud and blood and wrinkles and notes and drawings all over the Howling Commandos' "official" map of France).
And when SHIELD falls to Hydra, the Archive does not fall. Because you do not fuck with a Librarian. Or an Archivist. Or any library staff, really. Like, people who have dedicated their lives to the preservation of knowledge are not going to let Nazis destroy and/or corrupt that knowledge. (And the Preservation Department has lots of sharp objects in it, I'm just saying.)

And then when the info gets dumped on the internet, the head librarian is like, finally, I've been saying this for years, can we open the Archive to the public now?

Now I've just got to figure out what A.R.C.H.I.V.E. should stand for...


(Archival Resources Collective & Headquarters of Internally Verified Ephemera?)

Okay, so I haven't actually made it to that Highlander episode yet but it seemed appropriate for the first season of 12 Monkeys that I've been watching instead.

[Now that I think about it, I don't think there's actually been any live monkeys onscreen just pictures and drawings.]

Anyway, with all the Nikita overlap casting, there's a part of my brain that keeps expecting Maggie Q to show up and fix everything.

( Spoilers for Season 1 )

Unfortunately, SyFy does not have a great track record with making their series easy to watch online. I think the only reason S1 was available all at once on hulu was to hype S2 (and I definitely found it helpful to watch it all over the course of a week because that made it easier to keep track of the time travel shenanigans).

And wondering if they're not just doomed to be sort of awkward.

Because there are certain things that need to happen (and are thus unsurprising), and then there are other things that can't happen (which sorta kills the suspense). And inevitably there's going to be a continuity error.
And sometimes, you wind up in this sort of limbo state where X needs to happen, but it can't happen yet, so they wind up resetting themselves.

All of the episodes were new to me because they tend not to show the hour-long ones in the marathons, though I think I did see part of Jess-Belle at some point because I have vague memories of a woman turning into a big cat (my faulty memory replaced the leopard with a panther for some reason).

Valley of the Shadow had transporters, replicators, and force fields in small town America. It also had James Doohan, appropriately enough. He wasn't one of the main players, but he gets more lines than Nimoy in the Dean Stockwell/Yellowface episode.

He's Alive was very relevant to current events in terms of the influence of Hitler and his ilk. Like, I can totally buy that Donald Trump communes with the ghost of Hitler. (I had actually been thinking when I was watching various "Christmas Carol" adaptations that the 3 spirits deal wouldn't work on Trump because he's too terrible.)

Printer's Devil allowed for geeking out over a linotype machine that the devil rigs such that what you type into it occurs. Meredith Burgess always seems to show up in the book geekery episodes. I mean this was a newspaper technically, but printing press stuff is bookish, and then he's a Librarian in another episode, and the guy who just wants to read all the time in yet another episode.

No Time Like The Past wasn't a highlight, per se, but it's worth mentioning because of incompetent time travel shenanigans. This guy goes back in time to try to stop major tragedies, but he goes about it all wrong. Showing up in Hiroshima on the day of when you don't even speak Japanese isn't gonna help anybody. Nor is showing up on a ship just before it's about to be torpedoed. No one is going to believe you when you try to warn them about these things. The botched Hitler assassination at least felt more like the point they were trying to make about the past being unalterable. So finally, he goes back to 1881 to stay because he thinks it's simpler times or whatever, and okay. So you know that a fire is started by a kerosene lantern thrown from a runaway carriage. Therefore your focus should be the damn lantern and putting it out (he literally could have just grabbed it and blown it out). Not once again trying to convince someone to do a weird thing (unhitch the horses) that they're never going to do. And definitely not trying to unhitch the horses yourself because that's what leads to the runaway carriage in the first place. So basically they undermined their point about the past being inviolate by having the time-traveling protagonist be a complete and utter dip.

Ended with The New Exhibit wherein the curator of murderous wax figures becomes a murderous wax figure, as you do.

Only 11 episodes total, but since they're hour-long ones that's actually about how many I usually watch.

Next year will start with Of Late I Think Of Cliffordville.

...and wants a card via the snail mails for New Years?

*title stolen from the poem by Don McKay

Tracklist:

Rescue Me by Fontella Bass
[Pararescue]

The Marching Line by Vanessa Carlton
[Leaving the military + "There's no Captain to call out your name"]

Keep On Keeping On by Travie McCoy (ft. Brendon Urie)
[wing imagery + PTSD recovery]

The Way You Do The Things You Do by The Temptations
[Sam Wilson: actual Ray of Sunshine, Disney Prince, etc.]

Lean On Me by Bill Withers
["Everyone we know is trying to kill us." "Not everyone." + "When do we start?"]

Parachute by Ingrid Michaelson
[Sam/Steve: one of the times Steve literally jumps without a parachute, Sam literally catches him]

Mercy Mercy Me by Marvin Gaye
[gotta have Marvin Gaye on a Sam mix + "Things ain't how they used to be"]

Icarus by Bastille
[Flying is dangerous, but maybe that's part of the appeal]

Fly by Nicki Minaj (ft. Rihanna)
[This works as a more general Captain America: The Winter Soldier song, but it's specifically Sam because flying]

Listen on 8tracks.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams [re-read]

Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward [re-read]
Starquake by Robert L. Forward

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Dark Water's Embrace by Stephen Leigh [re-read]

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin [re-read]

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin

Kraken by China Miéville

Monster Island by David Wellington

Kindred by Octavia Butler [re-read]

Monster Nation by David Wellington
Monster Planet by David Wellington

Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin

Starting out the new year with more Earthsea: The Other Wind

there were 6 episodes I have never seen before.

Including the last one The Trade-Ins, which had a book metaphor in the intro because Rod Serling just gets me, okay?

"Mr. and Mrs. John Holt, aging people who slowly and with trembling fingers turn the last pages of a book of life and hope against logic and the preordained that some magic printing press will add to this book another limited edition."

To be continued tomorrow/next year.

and you would like a postcard for New Years, please message me your address.

I'm not even sure anyone reads this anymore, but...

Spoilers for Captain America: The Winter Soldier!

( Invocation )

I was thinking about giving up on Once Upon A Time...

( And then they started riffing on Oz )