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Interesting Tennant quote from a recent interview: Patrick Stewart (with whom Tennant recently co-starred in a London production of "Hamlet") has talked about how one of the reasons he keeps being asked to play these iconic science fiction characters is that the training that he has through Royal Shakespeare allows him to give it a gravity and a reality, so it's not just silly men in funny suits.
Well, there's a similar trick - "trick" is underplaying it a bit - to playing Shakepseare and to playing this kind of work: you've got to play it absolutely real. But the language of Shakespeare is slightly heightened, and you have to serve it up. And there's a similar thing to that science-fiction/fantasy stuff, and you have to absolutely ground it in veracity, and yet just serve it up a little bit. I completely get what Patrick says, and I'm sure Ian McKellen might admit to a similar thing. If you can sell that you're the King of Scotland, or Henry V on a tiny stage in a studio theater somewhere, then you can probably sell that you're a starship captain or a time traveler. There is a similar skill there, yeah. I was actually thinking about this while watching some making of footage of... something, recently. Avatar, maybe? Oh! No. Blooper reels from Star Trek and LotR. These people look completely ridiculous 'in person', with the camera pulled away and out of the scene. They're wearing dumb costumes, walking around crazy sets, and spouting kind of ridiculous dialog. But in the theatre, on the screen, they sell it as so real that we don't even question it. It's simply grand. It's simply somewhere else. I think that truly selling Science Fiction or Fantasy, in many ways, does require a different caliber of actor, and a different mindset. I wonder if this is part of why genre actors end up so recycled into the genre. I wonder if they /enjoy/ that about it, or if they'd rather do different things. Actors in genre fiction - and here I'm meaning something that attempts a bit more than 'look! Explosions!' - have to really sell some bizarre situations, and they have to make alien characters - not just blue ones, but also Gandalf, star ship captains - completely relatable to the audience. That's a rather higher demand than your average rom com or even stop-the-terrorist action plot.
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Woke up this morning and in the midst of brushing my teeth, got a phone call from my mom. "Don't leave the house!" She drove about a quarter of a mile down the road and started down the hilly area that we have to travel to get to the highway. About halfway down she noticed another car sitting on the side of the road, stuck there. By the time I got dressed and walked out to her, there were a total of four cars trapped in this hilly valley that spans maybe a quarter mile. A fifth came down to join us shortly after. The car in front of her ended up carefully backed down a smaller slope to a flat spot. My mother decided to try to edge down to the same and get off the side of the road.  It worked out well. An hour and a half later, the township came by with cinders (it's a county road - they were just nice enough to lend a hand) and we hit up the farmer up the road for a heavy chain to pull the van sideways so we could back down the road and then make it up the now-cindered hill. The township truck pulled three cars out before the county finally made it to clean our roads - at 9:30. Suffice it to say, I didn't make it to work until almost 11. They're calling for rain on Friday. If we endured that only to have all the snow melt into a big soggy grey puddle on Christmas, I am not going to be happy! What's amazing is that out of 5 cars, in a very dangerous locale (you can't see it, but there's a steep drop off on the right side of that road), not a single car was damaged or person hurt. They were all just... stuck. Tags: snow
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Interesting question: Does an online RP based in an author's world constitute a copyright infringement, or is it allowed under fair use? The four factors judges consider are: 1. the purpose and character of your use 2. the nature of the copyrighted work 3. the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and 4. the effect of the use upon the potential market. Discuss amongst yourselves. Tags: rp
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So after 4-5 hours last night, I have officially installed Windows 7 on my computer! I suspect most of this time was spent transferring over my files and programs - since it was a Vista-7 upgrade, it saved everything for me and there is very, very little I have to do to get things the way I want them again. Even my unbelievably amazing desktop picture is saved! The install got hung up last night about 10 on something about setting up my Windows Media Player settings, so I left it overnight and found it still hung up this morning. Through the magic of being slightly more techy than your average bear, I discovered that I could still use the task manager and thus could still open my internet connection and firefox through it, so I hopped online and discovered that all googled advice just said to restart it in safe mode and then normal. Lo, I did and lo, it went away and lo, it appears to be working now! I only had about 10 minute to fuss with it this morning, so I'll let you know how I feel in more depth tonight. One change I noticed immediately that is going to take some srs getting used to: the task bar has changed. I live and die by my quicklink bar, which has gone away (although there is a way to get it to reappear, but on the riiiight instead of the left) and instead you like... add little shortcuts to your task bar. This is mostly relevant because if I click the firefox one to open it, the shortcut goes away and I only have the firefox window. I am, however, accustomed to using that little quicklaunch button to open multiple firefox windows. And they moved the show desktop! I am pretty sure I can adjust. I can attest right away that it is already much faster to boot and much faster to load programs. Here's hoping it also doesn't crash windows explorer every 5 seconds. In even HAPPIER news, my FARSCAPE ALL OF IT came in the mail yesterday after being on backorder. While waiting for the computer to upgrade, I slammed through a disc and a half of episodes. My mom wanted to know if she'd like it. After my kneejerk 'uh, no,' I thought about it for awhile and had her watch the first episode with me. She left to go upstairs and said 'I think I might have to like this show!' I dunno. I think it could appeal, for awhile. Farscape is one of those shows that, especially in the beginning, is fairly light and easily accessible, because you have John to experience all these weird things through, and it takes awhile before you can really take the muppets /seriously/ for /srs/. Plus, it's funny, and Crichton makes up for a lot, and there's kind of this fun edge of exploring the vast unknown and very little kind of heavy 'mythology' at the get-go. I love these early episodes a lot more on my second time through than I did when I was watching them for the first time - in large part, I think, because I already love the characters, and I know that they are going interesting places. It makes it easier to watch stuff that doesn't /seem/ deep and look for signs of coming changes. I also believe strongly that early Farscape was absolutely saved by spectacular casting. Some of the lines they have come out of Aeryn's mouth, in particular, are just /horrible/. There is nothing even resembling subtlety in the exploration of her character and what a Peacekeeper is. She could have so easily come off as one-note and badly written. But right from the start, Claudia Black brings that edge to Aeryn, and that sense of something /behind/ the edge, and her chemistry with Ben Browder is clear, and already I am remembering why Aeryn/John is probably the only ship I have ever really shipped like mad. Zhaan likewise is giving a lot of frankly patronizing and annoying things to say, which coupled with a lesser actress would have been-- well. Patronizing and annoying. She manages to instead really emphasize that level of calm and caring that makes the character something else entirely. D'argo is pretty one-note and plot-devicey early on, and the actor doesn't rise much above it, but I know he does later, so that helps. But seriously. Some of the writing. About on par with some of the music choices, early on. I love Claudia Black. I'm just saying. That woman, and her accent, is positively /delicious/. Tags: computer woes, farscape
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backward through the stones 
