Useless Bitchy Crap

What happened to the DS9 reviews? Ugh. My laptop died. Now I use J's computer, when I have a chance, which is not often. :P

I am attempting to rewatch Excel Saga atm. My daughter wants to watch it in english. Ai yai yai. OK, I know I'm a bit of a subtitles snob, but seriously.... how can anyone listen to that? It's... it's so bad! It's awful! I wonder sometimes if they actually let the english voice actors listen to the japanese audio, or if the director just tells them kind of what they want. (or does the director themselves even listen to the bloody japanese audio...) Because it appears that all they told to the voice actress for Excel was "scream all your lines like a moron!" I dunno. The japanese actress has a pretty impressive CV behind her. She's awesome. That kind of rapid-fire high-energy delivery is not easy to do, and especially not to do it and do it so that it's good. English chick? Ya no. Neither of them. Although the second one is worse.

Ugh!

I shudder to think what they did with Hale from Hale + Guu then.

edit: ah. Took me a while, but I finally found an english clip. (wtf? anime is not popular anymore? well anime that's not fucking naruto?) So, voice acting: not awful. HOWEVER, the really annoying problem of japanese words having more syllables is really obvious, and the characters are going on and on with extra crap to fill in all the mouth flaps. Siiiiiigh...

... can you ever buy the dvds anymore? I shall have to look into it. That's a series I'd pay money for.

So! Livejournal down for a bit due to DDoS attacks??? Well that is interesting. In the meantime, I've been watching a crapload of DS9. Apparently some don't really hold DS9 in that high regard... it's not the same as other Star Trek series because it takes place on a station instead of a ship and is much more political. Whatever. The running storylines made it interesting, the political focus helped it keep from being TOO cheesy, and what the fuck, who cares if it's on a station and not a ship? I like it.

And who cares if Sisko is a crappy captain and a crappy actor. The rest of the cast makes up for it. And we have Dukat. Dukat. So, he's a guy who is very powerful, very dangerous, has a daughter that he dotes on, and a bad fucking attitude. I assume that I must have had a huge stupid crush on the guy when I was in highschool. Sigh, stupid me.

And Siddig el Fadil (Bashir) is apparently Malcolm McDowell's nephew?? Holy crap, I never noticed that before, but I should have, cause the guy looks exactly like a thinner, arabic version of the guy. Especially in the first season. The nose and the eyes, identical. It's a good thing that Siddig never does the crooked smirk thing, because they'd be so similar it would almost be ridiculous!


Anyways, I've watched about three season's worth already, and counting, so how about some reviews?

We'll start with season one.


Emissary: Wasn't there a TNG episode with the same name? Anyway, it's a pilot, and thank goodness, because I didn't like it much. All that setup with the borg and Sisko's wife was just to establish Sisko's unease with Picard, and who cares, because Picard is not going to be a recurring character, is he? Blahblah prophets, so boring.

But thank god they changed Kira's character. Her hair looks funny, her makeup looks funny, and although I love her later kick-ass no-nonsense personality, here she's just a nasty bitch, and to have a character (Miles, no less! come on Miles!) sniggering about "female bajorans"..... ugh. No, no, no. So bad. She was my favorite character when I was younger... I really loved strong female characters like her. SO glad she got toned down a bit.

And for most of the last half of the episode, Sisko is just fooling around in the wormhole. Oh so boring.


Past Prologue: Hum, nothing special. Bajoran politics, blahblah. Garek makes the episode interesting. Hooray for Garek. And hooray for klingon bitches. Fuck I love Lursa and B'Etor so much. I dunno why, but they are so awesome. Crabby klingon bitches. In fact I can't even remember what the rest of the episode is about, I had to look it up.


A Man Alone: meh. Jake & Nog are cute though.


Babel: this one is ok I guess, except for the silly abrupt ending where suddenly the scientist will be able to fix it all. Nevermind if he can figure out how to mass-produce his antidote, and administer it to everyone on the station, and do this all before anyone dies, AND find a way to rebuild the damage done by the virus thing. That alien who wanted to leave right away was acting funny the whole time, so I kept waiting for some plot point to be revealed, and it never was, so I guess it was just that the guy was a terrible fucking actor. I love Quark and I love his episodes, but I am confused about how restaurants work in Star Trek. Why does anyone eat food at Quark's when he just uses the same replicators as everyone else? Gotta love Quark in charge of the station, though.

REAL aphasia is a really neat thing, and I guess that's why this episode was interesting at all to me. That and O'Brien, who is a really good actor. Hm, one of the best on the show actually, I'd say.


Captive Pursuit: An interesting episode. The writing gets kind of silly sometimes but good. The Federation's translators must be awfully good, when an alien out of the gamma quadrant can be understood perfectly with no problems!


Q-Less: ugh. Yes we have some fun with Quark, and a character who was in NextGen, but goddammit, Q's first fucking episode on DS9, and he's not even doing anything cool, he's just having a fight/breaking up with his girlfriend. OH SO STUPID. Bunch of crap. And John de Lancie himself agrees, so there. (hey when is that guy going to come to the expo here? I'd love the fuck out of that)


Dax: Boring. The interesting question of whether or not the current trill is a separate entity or is responsible for the past actions of all the other trills is raised but never really answered.


The Passenger: ok. You know, these early episodes just don't seem as interesting compared to all the Dominian stuff. The only thing that made this episode a bit more interesting was the performance of Bashir acting possessed, and since I have a crush on him, that was interesting.


Move Along Home: silly episode. I wish that game actually made any logical sense. The only way I can accept it as not completely stupid is if this is a game that the only play with people/races who have no idea what it is and what is happening, and their enjoyment comes from observing the confusion of the players. Quark is always funny though.


The Nagus: I like Ferengi episodes. This one's kind of boring though.


Vortex: Some interesting writing. Dunno, I guess I like it when the episodes are all about layers of lies. I think that's why I like DS9 so much, so many episodes are all about getting to the bottom of a web of lies. A good actor for that fugitive guy makes the episode, I think. Cause otherwise, there's not much there, is there?


Battle Lines: neat idea, the punishment/lesson of the two groups being sentenced to knock the stuffing out of each other eternally, and sad how after all this time they still haven't learned a thing. I wonder if there's any future reference to this place, and if Kai Opaca managed to make any progress with them at all.


The Storyteller: Meh. O'Brien and Bashir with some funny lines, but inconsequential, and the B-plot (Jake & Nog helping the teenaged negotiator) was so pointless that I forgot about it.


Progress: nice writing for Kira, I love to see stuff set on Bajor, I just love the people and the design. Fun with Jake and Nog.


If Wishes were Horses: I am confused as to what this episode was supposed to accomplish. Weird shit happens on the station and then gets solved, with no real significance in the end, boring. The aliens are never explained, nothing happens, everything was all an illusion anyways, boring, boring, boring. Dr. Bashir is a little whore but I'm not complaining.


The Forsaken: BLUH. I very nearly did not watch this at all, because as soon as I saw Lwaxana Troi, I shut it off. I went back later and watched it, skipping over the very beginning where I assume she does her "Lwaxana Troi daughter of blahblah holder of the sacred chamberpot of Betazed" crap. Then the rest was actually, surprisingly, NOT annoying. Her hitting on Odo was uncharacteristically restrained, and she had a surprisingly touching scene with him in the elevator. So I guess although she SEEMS like a silly frivalous post-menopausal crazy bitch, she can also be a wise gal some of the time too. Dunno why Odo's so embarrassed about his liquid state.... doesn't look much different to me than when he's changing forms into something else, and he does that all the time in front of people. Oh well.

So that chick is the same actress that played Nurse Chapel in TOS? I never noticed that before. I also never ever liked Nurse Chapel.


Dramatis Personae: Boring, more weird shit on the station, more forces possessing people, everything is fixed abruptly in the end. Boring, boring, boring.


Duet: best ep of the season. Layers of lies that came back to the beginning in the end and I honestly did not guess what was going on. The thing has a great Silence of the Lambs vibe to it, the performance of the cardassian is great, especially in the climax as he swings from sadistic triumph, which we realize is all directed at himself, then breaks down and weeps as he admits the truth. For the first time Kira is seen to have compassion for a cardassian. The assassination at the end is kind of abrupt and pointless though. I wish Kira's dialogue had been written a little more logically and less ... unreasonable and illogical though.


In the Hands of the Prophets: blah, Vedec Winn. I hate her, boo. I guess she is a great villainous character though... she comes across as righteous and certainly thinks that she herself is in the right. The most dangerous villain. Could have been interesting, tackling the idea of religion taught in schools. Slightly. Star Trek likes to bring up real-world issues, but I notice that they usually don't really offer any satisfying conclusions, at least not when the issue is the slightest bit grey

I do like the bajorans, but their uniform religious faith gets aggravating. I know their religion is based around actual entities which, to us, do have god-like powers, but I mean the writers are obviously making parallels with modern religions, so it's very hard for me to accept any of it as anything more than superstitious garbage. It's also disappointing to see that it seems like most bajorans have a uniform interpretation of their faith... I mean, aren't there any bajorans who, like modern christians, interpret their holy books in less fundamentalist ways? Can't Kira accept basic tennents of her faith but also accept the science about the wormhole? It makes everything irritating.



Anyway. Season one was cute to watch, in its own way. The calm before the storm. Everyone is so happy and simple before the whole Dominion war stuff.

http://i.imgur.com/1hfcN.gif


Jesus.

I hate being sick.... bluhhhhh... make it stooooop...

The sink of poopy water finally drained, thank goodness. But I still can't do laundry or dishes. (the toilets are connected to a different main I guess and flush fine)

J does not want to phone a plumber. (apparently one of the deals with our lease is that we cover our own plumbing expenses, fuck) He instead is going to by some kind of drain snake and attempt it himself? Oh dear. We'll see how THIS goes!



One of the artists I used to follow on deviantart, a really cool steampunk clothing maker, has apparently gone insane these last two years, and is now jabbering on and on in her journal about consulting with some thousands of year old concsiousness to try and fix the world and all this shit. At first I wasn't sure if she was possibly writing in character? Like a steampunk character? But no.... I think she's serious.



And goddammit, SA did a subscription drive THE VERY DAY that a cat breeder was expecting her queen to have devon rex kittens. AAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

A cat is "rexed" if it has curly hair. There are (I think?) basically four different kinds of rexed cats, all caused by a different gene in each: Cornish rex, devon rex, german rex, and laperm. Devon and cornish rexes both look a little freaky, because their coats are so short they almost have no coat at all. The are missing the stiff outer coat of a normal cat, and just have a curly, downy soft undercoat. Devon rexes look particularly strange because breeders are favoring kind of an alien shaped head, but their coats are wavy and they look like little lambs! A german rex looks basically like a shorthair cat with a perm I think, and a laperm is a cat with a beautiful long wavy coat. Looks like the cat had a spiral perm.

Lots of cat breeds I'd love to buy someday. I probably never will, though. There's too may cats in the shelter. I know that many people buy cats, and I don't think ill of them for it, but I don't think I could ever buy a cat when I know that I could adopt one that is in danger of being killed because no one wants it.

The latest: Michigan is one of only two states I believe to have a law that says every single item for sale must have a price tag sticker on it. Some politician has moved that this rule be done away with, just like, oh I dunno, everywhere else in the world. And people are mad about it. "What if people get confused, or forget what their stuff costs?"


What?

I can remember when I was 12 or so and Brooks pretty much switched over to barcodes. I had a job removing price tags from things in the Shopper's drug mart. Uh. Or whatever the hell that store was. I've been living so long with barcode prices, I don't even really think about it anymore. Items are priced on the shelf, or sometimes on the item itself, in the case of books and things.

It's not confusing. Sure I might forget the exact prices of some of the shit in my cart, but I try to keep a running tally of prices in my head. I can see the price of everything being rung at the checkout. Now I can even ring in my own shit, too!

What the fuck is the matter? Are the people in Michigan retarded or something?!?

Yeah, I did some thinking... it's incredibly stupid for *me* to criticize anyone on their relationship choices. I'll try not to do that anymore.

OKAY WHICH OF YOU CATS KEEPS PEEING ON LAUNDRY IN THE BEDROOM.


I WILL get to the bottom of this.



(and btw, heh heh, it was kind of funny to pee on J's good sweater. he was very angry, and I laughed.)

K, I keep hearing mention of "leaving your shoes at the door" like it's a special thing.

I had heard before that Americans leave their shoes on in houses. No one ever gave me a first hand account though, it was always that they saw people in movies doing it, or that they had heard.


But, I keep hearing people mentioning "leaving your shoes off at the door" like it's some special polite thing that some cultures do, implying that they do not.


You guys seriously leave your shoes on?

Gross.


Maybe they think we're gross for getting foot-germs on everything, but how in the world could anyone accept having all kinds of dust and dirt and crap from outside all over their carpets?

Yay! I found a place to download all 12 volumes of the french Cybersix, and the scans are beautiful, too!


.... unfortunately, my french has gotten so bad that they're really hard to read, especially wordy parts where they talk a lot about feelings or technical plans and stuff. Sigh.... So I'm not sure if I should just read it quickly and try and get the basic gist of things, or spend time to try and pound out a reasonable translation of every panel first.



EDIT:


Oh! I tried entering a few panels into babelfish just to see if I'm getting the right gist of things. Neat! The Fixed Ideas? They're called Idée Fixe in french, of course, but plugging that into Babelfish gives me the word "obsession". Neat. Dunno if "obsession" is actually a good translation, but I think it's clear there's some kind of correlation, especially when Fixed Ideas, in the comic, have their brains altered just before death so that one single idea, thought, image, etc, is implanted into the mind. Kind of like zombies I guess.



At least that's what I THINK they said about Fixed Ideas in the comic. I sort of had trouble reading that part. ^_^