somniloquence

Yesterday started off very badly when Brent told me that the thing I'd driven all around town to find was the wrong thing. I even endured a bunch of guys at the hardware store laughing about me when they thought I wasn't there, because of my inability to remember the name of what I wanted. Then it just went downhill from there. The fabricator installer guys arrived with the soapstone when Brent was out, and before they got started, I heard them talking about the sink. Turned out to have two major cracks in it. So no countertops. I told them I really needed to wait for Brent to get back so he could tell me what to do, and in that time, they discovered that the swanky Eurostyle faucet wouldn't fit in the alotted space because the single handle lever goes forward and backward for cold and hot. No room in the back.

So they had to call the project manager and everybody else. it's a good thing I'm on vacation, since we spent the next hour and a half discussing it. I told them even if we could get a different sink (out of the question, since the fabricators cut the slabs based on that model), it wasn't a go for me because that was the first thing I picked out and built everything else around. But I have had these fixtures for months now, and I told them all I was really pissed that I was going to have go find and wait for a new faucet because somewhere along the line, someone didn't do their job. I think the fabricators cracked the sink, since they took it for measuring and I guess all that bumping around didn't do it any favors, but there's no way to tell. I was just angry. At best, I might get the countertops by end of week, but at this point, I'm not holding my breath.

And that means no plumbers till next week, or tile guy, or whatever... I knew it was too good to be true that I'd have it finished by my birthday. I went out today and when i came home it looked like Brent had been here at some point with the new sink. Otherwise nothing is happening. We decided to put the faucet in sideways. It's not ideal, and it doesn't look nearly as cool and swanky, but at least I don't have to wait another couple weeks for a special order faucet or whatever.

I thought Heroes might make up for the disappointment and frustration. Boy, was I wrong. I hate shows that are predicated on people being stupid. Notice I said people being stupid, not occasionally doing something stupid. Because there is a big difference between people making occasional huge to minor blunders in favor of plot development (Buffy, for example), and people habitually acting and thinking stupid. And everything in Heroes lately is happening because of the latter. Last year, I wrote about the difficulty of dramatic irony in the show in this post, and it feels even more relevant to me now, because we're not simply having to deal with knowing what is happening that other characters don't, we're also having to watch this all being done by stupid people being stupid over and over and over and none of them ever learning from their mistakes. I don't know if I can watch this show anymore after this "season" wrap-up, whenever the writers' strike ends. I don't know if Tim Kring really does see what's wrong, or if it was too late for him to fix things, or what, but... I'm sorry. My tolerance for stupid people is already quite low, and this borders on... humiliation. People should be humiliated to be this cretinous. I'm humiliated for them.

And I was disappointed this weekend by BSG: Razor. I can't even necessarily say why. I just found it really unsatisfactory and that Sci-Fi thinks that's enough to tide fans over until their absurd restart date of April 2008... sorry, asshats, ya lost me. I may have to get my Roslin and Adama fixes from fanfic if this keeps up.

In which I actually talk about something besides my stupid personal life for a change.

A couple weeks ago, I watched Heroes with mlyn, and griped a lot about how poorly they use dramatic irony on the show, particularly with regard to Mohinder, who is quite possibly one of the prettiest men on the planet but who is also, as they're writing it right now, the dumbest.

Dramatic irony is one of those things that, when used well, can engage an audience of readers, playgoers, movie-watchers, book-readers, etc. The problem is, it's often not done well, and it's especially poorly employed on weekly TV series, where it can frustrate the hell out of audiences when they're forced week after week to see things the other characters aren't getting.

I see a lot of misuse of the term in my job, where writers often think it means just really intense irony, but it does have a specific definition. Dramatic irony:

occurs when a character onstage is ignorant, but the audience watching knows his or her eventual fate, as in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet.

This is really just a fancy way of saying the audience knows what's going on, but the characters onstage (film, page, whatever) don't.

( Cut for Heroes spoilers up through recent eps, and Dexter S1 )