gwyn: (serious bznz littlespank)
I got a call today from a woman who runs continuing education at the community college in my part of town, wanting me to run a proofreading workshop that she said she "had enough students enrolled in." It's next freakin' week. I mean, what the hell -- how do you schedule a course without knowing you have an instructor? And it's at 9 am, which is just...not my time of day. It would also mean cutting down my six hour course that I do at the UW to three hours, which...I'm not entirely sure how to do. As it is, I don't really have enough time to get in depth with proofreading, at least, enough that I think people can come out of it knowing what they're doing. But I guess everyone enrolled works for King County, I'm just not sure what kind of proofreading information they're looking for.

Lately I've been proofreading behind a lot of copyeditors who don't know what they're doing. I never know what to say to the people who hire me; I usually just suck it up and repeat the copyeditor's mantra: It's not my book, it's not my book. But it's frustrating. I was telling someone recently about this, that I saw the word staunch used to mean stanch, a fine distinction that not many writers know, and I do not necessarily expect a writer to be smart enough to know the difference, but I damn sure expect the fucking copyeditor to know it. So many of the people I've read behind come out of the UW's certificate program, and it's really clear to me that they remembered stuff like style sheets and whatnot, tools of the trade, but they never learned the most important lesson, which is to strive to know as much about words and usage as you can, and always be learning more. You can't just rest on your reading experience; you have to keep current and open-minded about what's out there.

And I know that people interested in proofreading don't know enough about the basics of type and formatting; sure, they might be able to spot typos, but it's so much more than that. I'm not sure how much I can effectively communicate in three hours. Still, I'm going to go talk to her on Thursday and we'll probably also talk about creating a real workshop of some length to teach it. But geez, one week. I don't know how I'm gonna do this.

I'm behind again on my recs posts, but my rec I wanted to do yesterday is for Burn Notice. I'm always surprised that this qualifies for Yuletide, because it doesn't seem like that small a fandom to me. But I was happy to find this this year; it's a casefic with the voiceover comments like Michael makes in the show, and just dead on voices, especially that commentary. Fiona gets to do splodey stuff, and Sam and Jesse are involved, so it's like old home week, you know?

Living Well (9656 words) by LithiumDoll
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Burn Notice
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Fiona Glenanne/Michael Westen
Characters: Michael Westen, Fiona Glenanne, Sam Axe, Jesse Porter, Charlie Westen, Barry Burkowski
Additional Tags: Post-Canon
Summary:

As a rule, spies don’t have a lot of time for platitudes. Something that applies to the man in the street isn’t usually as relevant to the man hanging a hundred feet above the street – especially if the rope is fraying.

Good things come to those who wait, for example. Or, it’s the journey, not the destination.

gwyn: (nikita fatale sinecure)
It is more joy day! Yay! I have a very meager entry for more joy, and it's probably only going to give me joy because these are some of my favorite grrls out there. BUT. I have long enjoyed other people's Fights Like a Girl icons, and have wanted to make some for my favorite ladies, many of whom have sadly been kind of forgotten these days. I have some more I want to make a little later, but my arm is killing me at this point, so here are just 8 girl fighting icons with some current and distant faves. Take, share -- I'm not the best artist in the world and not very skilled with p-shop, but I love playing around anyway.

Fight like girls )
gwyn: (sonny crockett)
I know I keep pimping this show, and I know that no one's listening, but I keep trying: Burn Notice season 2 starts tonight at 10 on USA. They're also marathoning some episodes today as I write this.

If you are interested but want to catch up, the first season just came out on DVD. I got my set and reviewed them, and they are in pretty good shape. I found their treatment of commentary tracks very interesting -- each episode has a "Get Burned" section, where specific scenes or clips have a commentary from stars Jeffrey Donovan, Sharon Glass, Gabrielle Anwar, and Bruce Campbell, as well as creator Matt Nix. At first I was annoyed -- I didn't understand why they didn't do commentaries on the whole episodes, and just pick one or two. But after I saw that each episode had a few clips at least, to quite a few, it grew on me. This way we get Bruce Campbell being hilarious in each episode, as opposed to just a few choice ones. The pilot and the finale have the most commentaries included.

The package is quite low-rent, as you'd expect from USA. No special art, and the one posed shot they use over and over. One of the nice things though is that they beefed up the sound a bit, which I appreciate, especially after watching so many episodes of shows where there appears to be no sound engineers at all, like Dr. Who and Torchwood, because everyone's shouting over hideously overaggressive music all the time. The series has been really good with music both incidental and soundtrack, and they did a good job on mixing this. The menus all have a Play All feature, something I really love and which far too few TV discs offer (still! Why can't they get with the program!).

I think the show is best described as Rockford Files + Equalizer + MacGyver x Sneakers. (A lot of people throw Miami Vice in there, but beyond being set in Miami, it's really nothing like that. The best part of Miami though is the look, and how there aren't the same 12 Canadian actors and same 15 Vancouver settings that most USA/Sci-Fi shows use.) It's light and humorous, actiony and spy-stuff packed, with a few nice deadly serious turns. Bruce Campbell as Sam Axe, the ex-Navy SEAL sidekick to Jeffrey Donovan's burned spy Michael Westen, is a total treasure in the show, and Gabrielle Anwar totally won me over even though I thought I hated her. She seems far too tiny to be doing the things she does with weapons until you look close, and you see how incredibly wiry she is, and you get a look at her abs -- that girl is made of rebar. And I adore Sharon Gless as Michael's chainsmoking, hypochondriac mother. It is so good having her on TV again.

And there is definitely a slashiness between Sam and Michael, enough that Bruce Campbell commented on it. I won't say what episode or scene this was from to avoid spoilers, but in one of the commentaries, there was this little exchange (not verbatim):

Campbell: And here's the part where they kiss, but that got cut out. You guys always cut out the good parts.
Nix: ... I actually did write a kiss into that scene. I wondered if anyone would really see it in the script.
Donovan: We read the scripts.
Nix: I knew someone saw it when the next day my assistant called and told me she sprayed a mouthfull of Coke all over her computer...

Seriously, how could a show with Bruce Campbell not be worth someone's time? I loved his wry obervation about the key to Sam's character is being EX Navy SEAL -- Sam is a little chunky and has a sliiiight drinking issue (one of my favorite lines in the show is Michael being horrified by Sam coming over with a bucket of fried chicken. When they leave, Michael says, "And bring your bucket of fat with you," to which Sam replies, "And I'll bring my chicken, too."). And this year, there are some great guest stars lined up, like Tricia Helfer in a recurring role, Michael Shanks in an arc, and Oded Fehr, to mention a few. Here's hoping they can maintain the tone and the cool spy tricks into the new season.
gwyn: (brock samson aikon)
Man, I waited and waited for A&E to show series 5 of MI:5/Spooks, and they never did. I was on pins and needles after the end of S4, and it was so frustrating waiting for it to show up. The other day, the show popped up on my Netflix things "you might enjoy" screen and I had totally forgotten they were going to release the dvds here without it showing on TV.

Whee! I can't believe I'm so behind on this! )

If anyone was interested in seeing with Burn Notice, which ran last summer on USA, they are running the whole first season starting on Thursday, and the second season starts July 10. It's really an adorable show, fun and light and full of great performances.
gwyn: (sam details stoffel)
Damn, no Burn Notice this week or next, due to the stupid US Open tennis tournament. I ask you, who cares? No one watches tennis anymore except Muffy and Ted down at the club. Yet USA insists on carrying it every year.

I have really got hooked on this show over the course of the summer. If you're the kind of person who likes lighthearted TV fare over serious or scary, you should be watching. It's kind of like a cross between the movie Sneakers, and MacGyver, with some Equalizer and, as someone on my flist pointed out, The Rockford Files thrown in.

I love the gentle sarcasm and misanthropy the title character, Michael Westen, carries through the series, and I adore how "trigger-happy" his ex girlfriend and former IRA gunrunner Fiona is. Bruce Campbel is a delight as Michael's former spy friend who now enjoys living off his lady friends and pretending to be a playa. When the series comes back for its final couple episodes in a few weeks, looks like Campbell will be reuinted with his old friend Lucy Lawless, guest-starring.

Jeffrey Donovan is great at spinning his lines. Last week's ep made me laugh out loud when Michael was on the phone with a bad guy (whom they will often identify with a tag "Joe Blow -- head bad guy" or something; my favorite recently was a guy who greeted Michael at the door with "Dude, I've got a serious problem" and the tag was "Dude with a problem") who told him there was a sniper trained on him right then. Michael says at one point, while turning around to show off his assets, "How do I look? I look goood, right?" He's really fun, and they take a lot of opportunity to get him stripped down so we can enjoy the eye candy of his physique. Yum.

USA's web site has a lot of interactive things, which I don't care about, but the "Ask a Spy" weekly feature, which has Donovan answering reader questions like "how can I burglar-proof my home" in character as Michael, is really delightful.

Seriously, check it out before it goes away. It sounds like they are bringing it back next year, so yay, but I don't totally trust USA when it comes to things like that, so don't miss it while you have the chance now.
gwyn: (Default)
Life with Olive continues apace. She is warming to me a little more, now that I've started letting her outside. I finally had to give up trying to keep her indoors, with my goal of eventually letting her outside when I could supervise her. She is alarmingly clever and inevitably found ways to escape, and nothing I could do would bring her back in. I have never had good luck with outdoor cats; I've come to believe that if you love your kitty, you'll keep it indoors -- having lost cats to poison, hit by cars, getting chewed up in an engine, infections from animal fights, FeLV, etc., I vowed that when I was on my own, my cats would be indoors with outdoor privileges (supervised). I was lucky with Emma; she never much liked the great beyond outside the backyard and mostly stayed in the fort's perimeter except for the occasional wild hair when the great cat consciousness called her to venture forth.

But Olive, alas, has been an outdoor kitty. She mostly stays within the fortress backyard, but she must, at least once a day now, leg it up the alley or the street just to see what sort of trouble she can poke her pink nose into. The other day I was watering out front, thinking she was safely napping under the peony leaves out back, when who do I see marching up the street? She took a shine to the neighbor's porch and decided that, despite the ire of their own cat, she should take up residence there. I gave up after a while trying to get her back in.

The biggest problem is that she has had chronic diarrhea since I brought her home. And... how to say this delicately? She kind of... leaks. I have to take my new comforter in to the cleaners today after one such episode, and one of the main reasons she's scorned me as a new mommy is that I'm the evil person who chases her around, wiping her private bits. I finally figured out that if I scruffed her, she would submit more easily to wiping up. Sadly, though, I often don't know that she's making a mess (I feel very bad for her, because it clearly distresses her, too) until it's too late. Emma never responded to being held by the scruff, so it didn't occur to me for all these weeks that I could try this; 17 years got me out of the habit, I suppose.

I took her in for a vet visit since her stool sample test didn't show any parasites. We decided to try a special diet for a while to see if she could have developed sensitivities to something. She gobbled the venison I gave her when we got home, but then shunned it; so rabbit it will be for a while. Poor bunnies. But three months of this, with no treats, etc., is going to be hard. Not that she responds to treats, but she does like milk, though I've given her only the smallest amount of it.

When we were there, the tech took her away for tests, and it was right after explaining about the leakage problem. She said to the cat, "Aww, no one likes a leaky butt," as she picked Olive up, and I thought, well, that just about sums it all up, doesn't it? If only we were all cats, and that was the extent of our troubles.

On to something fannish! For a change, yeah.

I have been watching Burn Notice, USA's new summer series with Jeffrey Donovan (from the American remake of Touching Evil). It is really quite enjoyable -- a little like MacGyver crossed with the Equalizer and a dash of Bourne movies. Donovan plays a spy, Michael, who was given a burn notice -- basically, completely shut down, no money, no nothing, in the middle of a job, but he doesn't know by whom, and he ended up stuck in Miami, where his mother lives, stranded there until he can get back in the game. In the meantime, he is helping people by using his spy techniques -- Equalizer with a comic edge.

Though I have to agree with [livejournal.com profile] feochadn that Donovan's face looks like a giant potato, he's great in this role, and his easygoing sarcasm is a perfect fit with his co-stars, Bruce Campbell (when did he get fat? No, seriously, somewhere in between Bubba Ho-Tep and here, he became portly, and it is very odd), and Sharon Gless, as Michael's chain-smoking mother. All the guest characters come with these dramatic freeze-frame name introductions that are often quite funny. Donovan rocks his sunglasses, and he seems really believable as someone who isn't really do-gooding because he wants to, but mostly because he has little else to do, and it keeps his skills honed.

The best part for me might be that for once, besides Monk, this is a USA/Sci-Fi series that isn't filmed in freaking Vancouver (best line in Studio 60: "Vancouver doesn't look like anywhere! It's like Boston, California!"). Vancouver is truly one of my favorite cities in the world, and I adore spending time up there. But I am so, so sick of everything being set there, and filming in the exact same locations, and using the same 12 actors, and... one week, I watched four separate series and they all used the same tiny lagoon spot in Stanley Park and I just about sploded my head. It's really egregious when a show is supposed to be set in a sunny city like Santa Barbara and they stick a couple of palm trees in the frame and turn up the lighting way high to convince us. You're not fooling anyone, you little rascals!

So far, a number of Dexter's actors have turned up, and I look forward to seeing who else might show up. It's got snappy dialog, multifaceted characters, Michael is now driving his father's classic Dodge Charger, so what more could you ask for in a summer series? I know that I always seem to go for the odd shows and never the popular ones that everyone's gaga for, but... you should still check it out. Think of all the times I've been right and you missed the series when it was originally airing!

June 2025

S M T W T F S
123 4567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 11th, 2025 06:34 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios