I realized this morning what struck me as odd about the original crew of Moya: they’re not a crew, they’re a D&D party. Two warriors, a priest, a thief, and Ordinary Guy (who’d probably be classed as a bard). We started trying to categorize everyone else who shows up and realized that we’d need to know all the kits and extra subclasses to do it right. Then I thought of trying to determine alignments and couldn’t decide whether to use the D&D system or the TMNT system (which I barely know but seems to work better for actual people). It was at that point that Kelson said, “You know, it’d be easier to sort them into Hogwarts houses.” So we did. Continue reading

When it comes to serial entertainment, everything will end at some point. I’m sure even Superman and Spider-Man comics will cease someday. A show can end before or after it’s run out of things to say, but it’s worst when it hasn’t finished speaking.

We’ve all seen shows that kept going long after, by any rights, they should have been cancelled. Is there any doubt that Voyager only lasted 7 years because it was Star Trek, on a studio-owned network, and the previous two Treks had also run that long? “The Far Side” and “Calvin and Hobbes” ended while the artists were at the top of their form. Compare that to “Peanuts,” whose last 20 years were hardly worth reading, or the new “Opus” from Berkeley Breathed (although it does have its moments). Continue reading

The mystery of where the Farscape miniseries will air has been answered! From Sci-Fi Wire [archive.org]:

SCI FI announced it will be bringing back Farscape with an all-new miniseries — called Farscape: Peacekeeper War — slated to air in the fourth quarter of this year.

WTF? OK, it’s not the last place I’d expect – that would be Fox, or maybe Lifetime – but the Sci Fi Channel has spent the last year and a half distancing itself from Farscape, and a good chunk of that trying to move away from actual science fiction. I guess Dune must have done better than Scare Tactics.

Hmm, it might be worth getting cable again.

Further reading: Save Farscape, in particular Sci Fi Picks up the Mini [archive.org].

Congratulations to the Farscape cast and crew! We’ll be watching!

You know that car game where you look at all the license plates going by and you have to come up with a word using all the letters in order? (Okay, now show of hands for the people who didn’t learn it from me.) I got bored with that and started looking for letters that could make the names of characters in books and movies. Then I got bored with that and made it that I had to see at least two from the same source at once. I used to see them all the time, and now I hardly ever do. Then again, I was living at home when I came up with this and my mom’s minivan ended up with plate letters EGW, so every time I was in that car I automatically had one plate for The Wheel of Time.

So anyway. There was next to no traffic on the commute to work this morning, and we were pacing a beat-up little black car with a blue-and-yellow plate starting with 2AEY. It took me a second to register that I could spell Aeryn with that (kind of disappointing reaction time, but LOTR outranks Farscape in my obsession list right now), and I immediately started trying to see the plate on the car ahead of it. (The combo doesn’t count if the cars are separated by more than one car in either direction, you know.) While Kelson, who had realized what I was doing, was trying to speed up to see it, the car behind AEY passed us, flashing 5BLR. Bialar Crais, anyone?