How Nice!

This is a simple post about nice things, because nice things are nice, and my last few posts have made even my head hurt.
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Nice thing #1: I am thoroughly enjoying the John Ralston Saul book, The Collapse of Globalism. Reading him is always a pleasure, and this book is a much better piece of communication than previous stuff by him, including magnum-opus Voltaire’s Bastards.
Nice thing #1+1: My brother is letting me live in his apartment while he’s away. So good. And it gives me a chance to watch Buffy season 7, which (believe it or not given my history of indoctrinating people into Buffy appreciation) I’ve never seen before.
Nice thing #11: I sold an article to the Dominion Post. It’s a travel piece on Mexico’s Day of the Dead. (Those of you who subscribe to morgueatlarge will have read a piece on that before – well, this one’s different.)
Nice thing #11b: I like how I had brief pangs of ‘omigod teh DOMPOST is EVUL did i sell out?!?!1!’ and concluded ‘nope, you’re getting your propaganda into their media’ and then thought ‘you sold a travel article you stupid moose, not everything is a political moment’ and then I remembered Skunk Anansie ‘Yes it’s fucking political, everything’s political’. Anyway, it hasn’t seen print yet, so I shouldn’t be counting chickens. Run free, chickens, run free.
Nice thing #111: The reveal at the end of Doctor Who series 2’s penultimate episode has been spoiled for me, and it fills me with silly fanboyish glee. Hee hee hee. *sigh*
Nice thing #—: I have made some progress on Sekret Personal Project A, with a brainstorming gathering last weekend setting off a whole new train of thought on it. (It’s only Sekret because I don’t want to put it under the pressure of observation yet. The whole thing is still ill-formed. But I had some splendid people gather to discuss some key aspects of my ill-formed ideas, which was exhilarating, humbling, and, for me at least, worthwhile.)
Nice thing #all: People.

11 thoughts on “How Nice!”

  1. I don’t believe you haven’t seen Buffy Season 7. Nice try to convince me so though 🙂

  2. I haven’t seen Buffy season 7 past episode 2, because most of season 6 was rubbish and the first two episodes of season 7 were even worse. It was the sharpest decline I’ve ever seen in a tv show; season 5 is my absolute favourite.

  4. Strangely enough for me, Seasons 4 and 5 nearly convinced me not to watch any more Buffy. However, Seasons 6 and 7 revivied my enthusiasm considerably. Great stuff IMO.

  5. Luke: Yeah? Interesting. What about season 6 did you like so much?
    Spoilers for Buffy season 6 – here’s what I hated.
    To me, Season 6 had the lamest villains (those incredibly irritating fanboy kids), the dumbest theme (magick = drugs), the worst ending (Willow turning evil – could have been great, but I thought it was very badly handled) and was overall the most cliched “genre tv show”-like season I’ve seen of Buffy since the first. The witty dialogue of previous seasons was noticably absent, so I couldn’t even sit back and enjoy that.
    The only thing I liked was the musical episode, and that was largely because I love musicals. Not brilliant, but good. Shame the music itself was so poor (but at least it was better than Joss Whedon’s cringe-inducing theme for Firefly).
    After watching season 6 I read an interview with Marti Noxon, who guided most of the last two seasons of Buffy in Joss’s absence. She said that she was not a fan of the genre before working on Buffy, and her previous career had been writing things like after school specials about suicidal teenage girls. “That explains a lot,” I thought.
    For me, Buffy ends with season 5. I’m reticent to sit through the rest of season 7 as I’m worried it would kill off my remaining good feelings for the show.

  6. Luke, I swear to the almighty, I haven’t seen Buffy 7. It was on while I was new in the UK and I had no way to see it. Then, when I could have borrowed DVDs, I never got around to it. Until now.
    After I finish season 7, I might watch the second half of season 6. Because I haven’t seen that either.
    Did you know I once organised a letter-writing campaign to TV3 to stop them screening Buffy pre-watershed and cutting out all the violence? They changed the timeslot soon after. I claimed responsibility 🙂

  7. gotta see rewatching most of season 7 recently, I enjoyed it much more than I did at the time. Flawed and not as good as seasons 2-5, but still some great episodes, and dialogue and characters as good as ever. And i know I’m the exception but I liked evil willow. And also the fact that in both seasons 6 and (indirectly) season 7 the evil was caused by the good guys themselves (overuse magic, resurrecting Buffy).
    Dawn was a waste of space mostly though.

  8. Ben: I know what you mean, and I think it could have been good if it had been handled better. I thought it was clumsy, and too much like a “warning to teenagers” propaganda special.
    The whole “magick = drugs” thing particularly irks me when I think back to this, from a 100 question Q&A with Joss Whedon:
    71. What story will you never tell on Buffy, Angel, or Firefly? “Wow, smoking pot is wrong, I see that now!”
    http://www.slayage.com/news/030220-joss100qs.html

  9. Hey mate
    Don’t feel too bad about seeling to the Dompost. I know I may be a little biased actually working for the papers, but trying to be objective.
    First while I actually agree a lot of writers here have no clue, there are some very good ones as well, but sometimes they are ordered what they are to write about (like in any job) and then their stories get edited anyway.
    And 2, most of us don’t agree with the editorials. For example there was a lot of negative feelings within to the slant that was taken over those cartoons.
    But if you are a journalist and love to write there is very options available to you. And you can still do some good.
    I think like any media you have to pick and choose, and make your own educated decisions and not take things at face value.

  11. Selling an article to the DomP is not always the same as selling out. To invent a new Orwellianism, everything is political, but not everything is political in the same way.

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