Don't Be Afraid of the Dork

Sunday, January 4, 2015

Sundays through the Stargate - SG1 Re-Watch Wrap Up

Sundays through the Stargate is a weekly series that I am doing on Stargate SG1 which you can learn more about in The Beginning post. It is mostly for my own dorky edification but if there are any other fans out there I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Eight seasons of cracking science fiction adventure. That's how I would describe Stargate SG1. My other descriptor: Indiana Jones in space if Indiana had a "team" and a P-90 instead of a bull whip. It had plenty of explosions, running and jumping and gun porn for folks that enjoy that type of action while also having interesting enough characters and relationships for the folks who prefer the operatic side of sci fi. For people like me who really like both of those things, it was heaven.

Seasons 9 and 10
I feel bad not considering the entirety of SG1's run by stopping at the end of season 8. I did try to start re-watching season 9 but was, well, bored. I do hope to get to it some day and do it justice as I'm sure I am being too hard on it. Ironically, I think what pushed me to watch SG1 in the first place was my love for Farscape and excitement over seeing Ben Browder and Claudia Black together again. I just needed to get through the first 8 seasons to get to them. Unfortunately, my heart was snagged by the original team and by the time Ben and Claudia made their appearance, I was hopeful but too sad over Jack's departure to get into it. Ben Browder who I find mesmerizing and hilarious as John Crichton (Farscape) just seems bland and unfunny to me as Cameron Mitchell. Claudia Black as Vala is initially funnier than I remembered from my first watch of season 9 but her shtick quickly feels forced to me. The fact is I had gotten way too attached to the characters and Jack was my favorite followed closely by Sam. Jack's departure and Sam's somewhat diminished role meant I had a hard time engaging with the new configuration.

As with The X-files I wonder how it would have worked for them to have completely gotten rid of the original cast (except for occasional guest appearances)? I think the writers still had some decent stories to tell and with all new characters and relationships it may have avoided the "things not quite clicking" with the mix of old and new. I mean it doesn't even make a lot of sense that Teal'c would be fighting with the Taur'i anymore now that his lifelong dream for the Jaffa has been realized - they try to explain it but it doesn't really work. It probably wouldn't have worked either and in fact I feel like there are a good core of fans that enjoy season 9 and 10. In fact I just red an online article that called the finale of season 10 the best episode in Stargate history. If you are one of the fans that enjoys these two seasons, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

The Best of... Lists
Enough of seasons 9 and 10. There is PLENTY to tackle with the first 8 seasons and here are some of my "best of" lists though they should more properly be called "my favorites" as I am, sadly, not the sole arbiter of what is best.

Seasons Ranked from Worst to Best

8. Season 1
7. Season 5
6. Season 7
5. Season 8
4. Season 2
3. Season 6
2. Season 3
1. Season 4 - Of course it's my favorite. Not only does the 'ship make its most appearances but it's the peak of the Tok'ra-Earth alliance and I love me some Tok'ra machinations. Plus there are 7 out of the 22 episodes that are some of my favorites of the entire show and it ends with Carter blowing up a sun!

This was very hard and if you ask me again tomorrow I may change the order. To rank them I was trying to balance the number and quality of my favorite episodes per season plus an indefinable overall vibe of the season. Seasons 7 and 8 have a large number of some of my favorite episodes but the team dynamic is all wacky in both these seasons and they are overall a little disappointing. I have fond feelings for season 6 but it only has a couple of episodes that I really love. Season 4 is definitely the best, Season 1 is definitely last - the rest I'm not so sure.

Favorite Episodes (in season not rank order because ranking is too hard)
1. Episode 2.2 In the Line of Duty - The Tok'ra Jolinar invades Sam's body against her will and SG1 is introduced to a new kind of Goa'uld.
2. Episode 3.12 and 3.13 Jolinar's Memories and The Devil You Know - SG1 and Martouf mount a rescue of Jacob/Selmak on Sokar's planet which emulates Hell.
3. Episode 3.22 Nemesis - Season 3 finale where Jack, Sam and Teal'c face off against the replicators for the first time.
4. Episode 4.3 Upgrades - A sexy Tok'ra scientist equips SG1 with armbands that increase their physical and mental abilities 100 fold - hilarity and drama ensue.
5. Episode 4.6 Window of Opportunity - SG1's most fun episode dealing with timey wimey stuff - the Earth is caught in a time loop and only Jack and Teal'c are aware of it.
6. Episode 4.10 Beneath the Surface - SG1 have their identities and personalities overwritten and are forced to work in an underground energy plant on a corrupt alien planet.
7. Episode 6.6 Abyss - Jack, having been betrayed by a Tok'ra symbiote, is captured and tortured by Ba'al.
8. Episode 6.12 Unnatural Selection - The replicators have evolved into human like forms and they are creepy as hell.
9. Episode 7.13 Grace - Sam is trapped alone on the Prometheus in space and must come to terms with some things in order to save herself and her shipmates.
10. Episode 7.21 and 7.22 Lost City Parts 1 and 2 - Jack has once again downloaded the ancient database into his mind and SG1 is in a race against time to track down the Lost City and a weapon they can use against the attacking Goa'uld.
11. Episode 8.11 Gemini - Sam faces off against her most diabolical opponent - a replicator version of herself.
12. Episode 8.16 and 8.17 Reckoning Part 1 and 2 - The Replicators led by RepliCarter, Anubis/Ba'al, the Jaffa and Earth all clash as all 8 seasons of the show are brought to a head.
13. Episode 8.19 and 8.20 Moebius Parts 1 and 2 - A fun and loving send off for the show and tied with WOO for timey wimey good times.

And with that I think I'll wrap this up. There are probably lots of other lists I could make - favorite all time moments, favorite Jack/Daniel moments, and of course favorite Sam/Jack moments or just Jack moments period. However, I think it's better if you just watch the show and see for yourself all the great moments. So get your butt through the Stargate and experience the adventure, romance and snark. Oh and let me know about your favorite episodes, seasons, moments, anything about the show because I am tired of babbling and want to hear what y'all have to say for a change. Lay it on me!

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Saturdays in the Garden - Guest Room or Green House?

OUTSIDE
Last year was pretty lackluster in the gardening arena. I had a bit of garden ennui after several years of fighting with my yard's inadequacies and then last winter was brutal with record cold temperatures and very little moisture/snow cover. A LOT of things died including my roses, Echinacea, mint, chamomile, etc... and about half of my garlic crop. I was also trying to be particularly thrifty and so didn't replace many of the perennials I lost.

I'm feeling more jazzed about things this year, and my first plan of action is to turn my guest bedroom into seed starting central and as much of a "greenhouse" as I can considering the room is carpeted. I don't really use the upstairs rooms of my old house because of poor venting etc... which means that it is usually too hot in summer and too cold in winter. The guest bedroom, which only gets used once a year or so, has a south facing window and I have a daybed in the current Office/junk room that would probably more comfortably accommodate guests anyway.

Cleaning and Organizing all this has been on my house to do list for a few months and now it's January so time to get cracking! I'll probably start onions at least in February. So the next couple weekends will be devoted to the rooms sorted and with getting my garden planned and seed order in. Here are the before pictures:

Current set up in Junk Room/Office

Future Greenhouse, Current Cat Lounge

LIFE
It was a good entrance into the new year. Quiet with plenty of time for reflection. An introvert's dream new years :0). January - April are generally crazy busy times at work and I was dreading the coming of January. Having a good chunk of time off helped me get things in perspective and I'm feeling much happier about what's to come. Which is why time off is just as important as time on. Don't be a workaholic. Well, unless that really works for you.

I plan on devoting a good chunk of today to watching the final 5 episodes of Coffee Prince, the K Drama I got addicted to last week. I have a feeling it's going to be an emotional roller coaster!

BOOKS and BLOGGING

I finished the The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes an Anthology edited by John Joseph Adams as planned before the new year ticked over. I also finished the audio of a novella by Brandon Sanderson called Legion. With these two final books, I finished the year having read 92 books.

I finally finished up Wild by Cheryl Strayed this morning which has mostly been a disappointment though admittedly I had very high expectations. I've also started listening to Gulp by Mary Roach which is typically informative and hilarious and have made a good start on Mr. Kiss and Tell the second in the Veronica Mars mystery season which will be released January 20th.

It was also a busy week on the blog.

SUNDAY: Sundays through the Stargate - SG1 Season 8 AND Sundays through the Stargate - The 'Ship Addendum. This is the last season I plan on doing a post about as it's the last season with the old gang. I did a separate post to wrap up all my feelings about the 'ship so that anybody who didn't want to read my rant could skip it:0).
MONDAY: Review of Sabriel by Garth Nix. It was as fantastic as I imagined it would be.
TUESDAY: Top Ten Tuesday - Resolutions for 2015.
WEDNESDAY: Sign up for the 2015 Eclectic Reader Challenge!
THURSDAY: Sign up for the 2015 Read Harder Challenge!
FRIDAY: A look back at 2014's reading and blogging.

For the first full week of 2015, it seems like I should have some new and improved content but not so much though I am going to try and participate in a new Meme on Thursday.

SUNDAY: Sundays through the Stargate: SG1 Wrap Up. Season Ranking, Top Ten Favorite episodes of the show etc....
TUESDAY: Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Debuts of 2015. This is going to be really difficult as I don't generally keep up with this stuff....
WEDNESDAY: Review of The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes edited by John Joseph Adams.
THURSDAY: Tough Traveling - Snarky Sidekicks. This is a fun Meme hosted by Fantasy Review Barn that picks one common trope from Fantasy Literature and invites bloggers to list some of the books where they have encountered it.

That's it for this New Year's week. To wrap things up, a horoscope from master astrologist the Bloggess.

Sagittarius: Never tell a Sagittarius to calm their tits. They will become violent and stabby. “No, why don’t you calm your tits, sir? MY TITS ARE WILD AS THE WIND.” ~ Said every Sagittarius ever.

This is quite accurate. I would get pretty ragey if someone told me to "Calm my tits." I encourage you to visit if you'd like to see what wisdom the Bloggess has divined for your sign. If it doesn't provide you with wisdom, it will surely make you laugh. Have a great first week of the
2015!

Friday, January 2, 2015

A Year of Reading (and Watching): 2014

Last year, 2013, was very obviously the year I discovered Young Adult literature. I'd like to say 2014 had some equivalent broadening of my reading sphere but it really didn't. The only "trend" per se was that I read quite a number of Sherlock Holmes fan fiction which really doesn't count as its own genre or category. I still read a fair number of Young Adult/Middle Grade titles (20) which was about the same rate as 2013 (22%). One improvement is that I really liked a higher proportion of them in 2014 so I hope that means I am getting better at knowing what to look for. My favorite YA titles from this year were:

Sabriel by Garth Nix
The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer
The Monster Blood Tattoo Series by D.M. Cornish
The Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce
The Lovegrove Legacy Series by Alyxandra Harvey
The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale

I read 92 books total this year which exceeded my Goodreads goal of 90 books. This has encouraged me to think I can finally get to 100 books in 2015. I read mostly fiction (82) but also read some good non-fiction. One book I wasn't sure where to put - Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Childhood memoir or mostly fictional tale? I shelved it under both. Of the true non-fiction some of my favorites were:

Wild Comfort by Kathleen Dean Moore
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Other random tidbits. The oldest book I read this year was A Woman in White by Wilkie Collins published in 1860 followed closely by Middlemarch by George Eliot (1872) which was also the longest book I read (904 pages). Goodreads creates this cool infographic plotting publication year vs. year read and since I started on Goodreads in 2008 you can definitely see the dots getting more and more tightly grouped into recently published works - especially since I started blogging. I like being more aware of recent releases but I do want to continue to read older books as well. I read fifty books by women authors (54%) and 42 written by men (46%). Five books were written by authors not of European Caucasian descent (5%).

There were a couple of reading firsts this year. I joined NetGalley and requested a few ARCs, one of which ended up on my best of the year list (City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett). I tried not to get too carried away and only ended up requesting a handful of books which is likely all I can handle. 2014 was also the year I learned to like Urban Fantasy thanks to Ilona Andrew's Kate Daniels series and a couple of other great UF books like Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch.

I also want to check in on the two reading challenges I tackled this year, neither of which did I successfully complete. Good thing I've added in a third challenge for 2015! *sarcasm* The Eclectic Reader Challenge had 12 categories in which I was to read one book. I ended up not being able to finish books in the Travel Non-fiction and the Military Fiction categories. For the 100 books project, I am trying to tackle some books I feel I should read to be all well-rounded and stuff in a five year period. That means a minimum of 20 books read each year. In the first year (2013), I only read 16 and I just missed 20 this year as well by only reading 19. I've sworn in a very proper ceremony involving a couple of bemused dogs, that I will read 25 in 2015. We'll see. I don't know why I can't reach this goal because as in 2013 half of my top ten favorite books of the year came off the 100 Books Project list:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Wild Comfort by Kathleen Dean Moore
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Finally, (at least books wise) Goodreads will also create a list of the authors by whom you've read the most books which I found pretty interesting. I cut off the long tail of authors of whose works I've read two books but everything from 3 or above is listed.

	books read
1	Georgette Heyer	16
1	Bill Willingham	16
3	Agatha Christie	11
4	Alyxandra Harvey	10
4	Lois McMaster Bujold	10
6	Lisa Kleypas	9
6	Jim Butcher	9
8	Garth Nix	8
9	Carola Dunn	7
10	Dorothy Dunnett	6
10	M.C. Beaton	6
10	Julia Quinn	6
13	Jacqueline Winspear	5
14	Joe Hill	4
14	Kate Ross	4
14	Mary Roach	4
14	Libba Bray	4
14	Alan Bradley	4
14	Ilona Andrews	4
14	Dave Duncan	4
14	Ellis Peters	4
14	Joe Abercrombie	4
14	Steve Hockensmith	4
24	Laurell K. Hamilton	3
24	Stephen Booth	3
24	D.M. Cornish	3
24	Nancy Atherton	3
24	Kathryne Kennedy	3
24	Suzanne Collins	3
24	Kresley Cole	3
24	Stefanie Pintoff	3
24	Lian Hearn	3
24	Pamela Aidan	3
24	Kevin Hearne	3
24	Marissa Meyer	3
24	Robert B. Parker	3
24	Bill Bryson	3

The last thing to comment on for 2014, were my efforts to post about two of my favorite TV shows - The X-Files and Stargate SG-1. The series of posts helped me get a lot of pent up thoughts and feels about these shows off my chest but I'm not sure how they worked for anybody else, lol. They ended up being very long and somewhat rambling posts. I'd like to continue to do this with some of my other favorite shows but need to play with the format to see if I can't make them a tad more readable and engaging. Since the blog's inception, I've actually posted quite a bit about TV and Movies so I created a page to organize all of the TV links.

For the blog, 2014 is officially over. Hurrah and on to 2015. If you have any blogging advice or words of wisdom, lay 'em on me. I'd love to hear it and most certainly need it.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

2015 Read Harder Challenge

Book Riot Read Harder Challenge

The word eclectic is not used anywhere but this is very similar to the Eclectic Reader Challenge in that it is meant to help broaden what one reads. I am definitely attracted to these kinds of challenges though they don't seem like a natural fit. I'm a mood reader and have trouble forcing myself to read anything. But it's good to push oneself, right? I am overlapping books on this challenge and the Eclectic Reader Challenge as much as possible which makes me feel like I am kind of defeating the purpose but there are a number of categories that don't overlap so it does end up being 26 books overall between the 12 categories for the ERC and the 24 categories for this challenge.

Here are the tasks and what I intend to read for each category, subject to change on a whim of course. I left one category open, #18 A book that someone else has recommended to you, because I know I will get a lot of recommendations over the next year and want to go with the flow. I didn't double up within either challenge - each task/category gets its own book. When possible, I've tried to overlap the list with books I already own and with my 100 Books Project. I am organized this year, y'all! It may all go horribly, delightfully wrong:0)!

One final comment - if there are links within the task text those are Book Riot's links that provide ideas for that particular task so check those out if you are interested. Also, book links go to Goodreads.

24 Tasks