(no subject)

I was totally just in the middle of writing a review of the Torchwood BBC radio play but we interrupt this broadcast to bring you a late-breaking text message from R:

"Yo, [That Girl] is pregnant by her new boyfriend. Film at 11."

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA OH R. I am so glad he got out with his childlessness intact.

(no subject)

So. I listened to the Torchwood BBC Radio Play this morning on the way to work.

Wow, was that awkward. I cringed on behalf of everyone involved.

Granted, I have some prejudices about radio plays. I realise that radio dramas are more common in the UK, but I can't help believe that if, in the modern era, you're going to write a radio play for a pre-existing media franchise, you should really dig into the fact that it's radio. You can't just take a spec television script, rework it so the visuals aren't necessary, and have a successful radio event (which is what I suspect happened in this case). You cannot randomly assign banal observations to any handy character in order to get your visuals across. And, ideally, you shouldn't really bother with epic visuals to start with. There's just no point, and it pulls you away from the nucleus of the story.

ALSO: REVERSING THE POLARITY FOR GREAT LULZ. I cracked up laughing on the El when I heard that. Seriously? Really? You're going to reverse the polarity of the positron flow? How nice for you.

( Cut for spoilers. )

The upshot, for me: The writing wasn't that great, and that crippled the actors; too much time was spent on expos and not enough time on plot. And hey, okay, you're doing a radio drama for a show that not only features a hero obsessed with 40's culture but has canonical time travel. A science experiment in Switzerland is seriously the best you could come up with?

But I have restrained myself from rewriting The Shrine so that it's not one long repetitive argument with Keller, I can restrain myself from writing what a Torchwood radio drama should be.

The sad thing too is that I looked up the writer when I got to work this morning, and he's done a ton of radio dramas for the Beeb Doctor Who franchise. Of course he also wrote Day In The Death, an episode I disliked, and Slow Decay and Border Princes, two really awful Torchwood novels. Seriously, I had to stop listneing to Slow Decay when I reached the scene where Rhys was having a conversation with his own belly fat. Border Princes is just a Torchwood Sue with good grammar.

I have learned to live with my expectations continually being disappointed because I realise that my expectations are usually unrealistically high. Even so, this managed to fail my consciously lowered standards.

*sighs*

(no subject)

GirlBoss was recently replaced (she's at another branch now) by NewBoss. It's taken me two weeks to figure out who he reminds me of, but I finally managed.



And now that I've thought it, I can't unthink it. DOOM.

(I've never actually seen anything with Alan Tudyk in it, except for some Firefly episodes years ago, and my memory of them is pretty hazy. Thanks god.)

(no subject)

Even better, BossBoss and I just got into a conversation about how excited we are that there will be new TV of SOME KIND in the near future, which got us onto the topic of scifi television, and I confessed that NewBoss looks like Alan Tudyk, and he said "Once he's settled in a little I want you to photoshop that for me."

You know there are days I worry that this job isn't something with a whole lot of room for the kind of promotion I'd want to have, and there are days I wonder what I'm doing with my life, but I have to say that most hours of most days I really quite like my job.

(BossBoss: That's Jack Harkness, isn't it?
Sam: Yep. Spoilers for the new Torchwood season.
BossBoss: Who's the guy in the suit?
Sam: Seriously, I'll burn you the DVD of Season One as soon as I get a television.)

(no subject)

For $8 worth of food I just got a million dollars' worth of entertainment.

I picked up dinner for R on the way to his place after work, to watch some Wheel and get the dirt on That Girl. I walked in and said "So how are you?" and he replied, "I'm not pregnant!"

Over burgers I found out that he had seen her on Tuesday and gotten "the fish eye" and then on Wednesday, after a gig, one of the women in the Blues scene, who apparently has all the grapevine news, said to him, "You'd have found this out anyway, I guess. That Girl's pregnant."

R says he's never been closer to a coronary in his life, because he thought it might be his.

"Oh! No! It's not yours," the woman said. "It's J's."

J is a guy That Girl has been seeing since she stopped stalking R.

Wait, let's go back.

FOOTNOTE: That Girl, and this is more info than I needed to have about R's sex life, apparently used to want to have unprotected sex because she was convinced she couldn't have children. R, not being a TOTAL MORON, insisted on condoms.

Okay, flash forward. She's been seeing J for what, maybe two and a half months now, and she's two months pregnant. R and I are in alternating paroxysms of schaeudenfreud over her and sympathy for her and her impending child. J has convinced her to keep the child, and he and his four cats are moving in with her and her two cats and, in a special guest star appearance, THAT DOG!

She got him back from the veterinarian friend who took custody when she said she was moving out of state.

Her mother is apparently also staying. In That Girl's one bedroom apartment.

As M said when she came over, "It's good to see the twists and turns that peoples' lives take, so that you can choose which twists to participate in."

I do feel bad for her, it's a big life decision and everyone's talking about it in the blues scene, it can't be easy on her right now. It's just...hard to be too sympathetic when I once got chewed out by her at four in the morning, because she thought R was cheating on her, because he wouldn't answer his phone.

WHAT A DAY.

I'm ordering a pizza. Who wants in?

(no subject)

The black and white collage is finished! It's printed and hanging on my wall next to the only other thing currently hanging on my wall, a GIGANTIC WELSH FLAG that two good friends of mine sent me :)

( Click for process images and photo. )