12% of my brain is able to focus today
I tried McDonald's sweet iced tea for the first time last night and oh my giddy god is it SWEET. I don't know how it compares to the sweet iced tea found all over the South that I read about in Jane and Michael Stern's Roadfood, but if it's anything like that, I have to tell you I cannot take it. I felt an onset of diabetes just from the one sip I had. O.o I went home and watered it down by 100% and IT WAS STILL TOO SWEET. It's like drinking syrup! Plus there was no taste of lemon, and I like my iced teas very lemony.
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jade_okelani is going to be here in ONE WEEK. How is that possible?! Eeeeeee! I still have a lot of cleaning and organizing to do, for my own sanity, because Jade has already said she doesn't care.
Now that it's the end of May, all the TV shows are wrapping up, and I have sooooooooo much to catch up on. It's exciting and overwhelming at the same time. Over the long weekend I managed to finish all of Fringe S4.
- I'm sorry to say I've lost significant love for this show. I still enjoyed it just fine, but I didn't feel that extra something that makes me want to marry it.
- I found a lot of the mythology stuff confusing and incoherent, but I fully admit that that could just be me. I never was able to follow along with the XF stuff all that well either... though XF did a better job of keeping me interested despite that. But for instance, it never made any sense to me why Peter disappeared to begin with. Why would joining the two universes cause him to disappear? It's not like he erased the original timeline or anything. So logically that was nonsensical to me.
- It turns out that I find prime!Lincoln Lee extremely uninteresting. :/ It's not like I'm a rabid Peter/Olivia shipper (I like the two of them as individuals, and since they want to be together, so be it), but trying to force some romantic tension between prime!Lincoln and prime!Olivia never felt right to me. I mean, is it necessary for Olivia to become romantically entangled with ALL of her partners?!
- On the other hand, I did very much like alt!Lee, and was bummed that they killed him off. For what purpose, I can only assume is so that prime!Lee had a place to go when Olivia remembered Peter/her original life. Honestly, I'd rather he have died instead of alt!Lee, because alt!Lee already had a great relationship/romantic tension with alt!Olivia.
- I've decided I don't like calling alt!Olivia Fauxlivia because she's not really faux, is she? She's just as much Olivia as prime!Olivia is... just because she's from a different timeline doesn't mean she is somehow false while the other is real. They're separate but equal.
- I'm pretty meh at the idea that basically everything that happened in the 3 seasons that came before this one was... erased. That even the same cases can be repeated (like the porcupine monster), characters that died show up again, etc. I don't have any particular desire to do it all again, you know? That none of that ever happened. Or that now they'll be better at those cases because they've done it before. Also it seems like a really lazy way to take back all the stuff they apparently realized had gone too crazy/astray (such as alt!Olivia having Peter's baby).
- I really liked ep 19, where we get a glimpse of the Observer-ruled future. I had fun with that ep (and to see Desmond from Lost!), though I would have liked to have seen more Peter and less Walter. I think that's a pretty consistent complaint of mine, though -- MORE PETER. I can't believe we had to wait 4 episodes just to see him again. Joshua Jackson is just one of those actors who I find very likable, like Josh Charles or Matt Czuchry. ANYWAY, back to this ep. I find it disheartening that Olivia was nowhere to be seen. :/ Does Walternate still kill her? But wasn't that part of the other future, the one that doesn't exist anymore? Plus Olivia "died" at the end of S4, doesn't that count as her "death"?
- If the Observers have already experienced everything already anyway, what is the point of the ones that come back to witness the stuff? They know that their own kind eventually take over the planet, right? If they're trying to help mankind, why don't they warn them about THAT? Maybe that only came about later, when Peter changed things? But we see them at that point too, discussing Peter being erased, and anyway, THEY seem to be able to know that things were changed; THEY remember Peter and the original timeline. So I don't see how they wouldn't have known all along about what happens in 2015.
- I could see the "I'm pregnant" coming a mile away. I can't imagine that I was the only one, given ep 19, though there were a few moments when she looks uncertain/unhappy and I thought she might have some bullshit excuse for why she and Peter needed to break up. Anyway, that, like sooooooooo very many things in this show (basically, all the supernatural stuff that doesn't deal with the parallel universe mythology), reminded me of The X-Files -- that moment when Scully tells Skinner the same thing in the hospital.
- I really hope they do something awesome with the last season.
I'm also halfway through Glee S3! This show. When I'm not watching it I feel extremely ambivalent about it. Then I watch it and it sucks me in all over again, mainly because the song-and-dance numbers are so wonderful. The plots, however, are just as much drivel as they have always been. Easy resolutions, characters that do and say things pretty much to serve whatever "plot" has been introduced in that episode, etc. It's a total trainwreck. I still find Rachel and Finn EXTREMELY uninteresting, but it's still better that they're together rather than not, because when they angst about being apart it's even more torturous.
I'm glad to see Mike Chang get something resembling a plotline, though it's something straight out of Asian Dead Poets Society. They still way overuse Rachel, and while I totally love Brittany and Santana, I'd still like to see them spread the love a bit more. Poor Tina NEVER gets any solos. Or Quinn. I like Kurt, but I'm just not a fan of his singing. At all. Which is more than I can say for Finn, who I basically don't like in any way. Puck getting it on with his baby's adoptive mother was just so BLAH. Seriously? I still love Quinn, and am glad that she dropped the whole crazy thing where she was trying to sabotage Idina and get Beth back, but her arc, just like all of them, happened too quickly -- it wasn't earned. None of their resolutions are earned. >< Anyway... I really, really like the new Irish guy, and can't stand Sugar.
I've also seen the first 8 episodes or so of Parks & Recreation S4. I love this show. Ben and Leslie are so cute. And Ron's the best. So far this season I can take or leave the rest of them (OK, Anne and Chris can stay). Even though everyone looooooooves April, I'm on the fence about her. I usually waffle between liking her and hating how mean she is. (Santana is a little too mean for my taste as well, but I like her much more than April.) Yeah, that's pretty much all I have to say. :)) Funny show is funny.
Also, of course, there's the latest Game of Thrones episode, 2x9 'Blackwater.'
-akscully is right, you can totally tell that GRRM wrote this episode, because the characters feel more authentic, in what they do and especially, what they say.
- Really loved all the interactions between Cersei and Sansa in this ep.
- Thought the confrontation between the Hound and Bronn was kind of WTF though. I don't think that happens in the books and I'm not sure why it happens here.
- Sansa/Hound yayyyyyyyyy! Really liked that scene, though it made no sense in the books why she didn't go with him, and it makes even less sense in the context of the show. She stands a better chance of surviving with him than with staying in the pit of vipers, especially since she comes to the realization that he would never hurt her.
- OK, I don't know how ANYONE could survive that wildfire attack. It looked like it had blown up and consumed EVERYTHING, when you watch it from afar with Tyrion. And yet close up people are still running around. And obviously it was survivable since we know that several characters DO survive it. It just didn't look that way from afar at all.
Did I mention that I finally received The Walking Dead compendium from the library? I would have loved to have gotten it even a month ago. Now with my Avengers obsession I really couldn't care less. >< Sigh. And I've waited SO LONG for it.
Finally finished reading The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley. It was recced to me by K's friend C, who LOVED it, and it's also got plenty of other accolades. I was totally underwhelmed by it. It's a work of historical fiction with two tepid (to me) romances, and far, far too much of the novel is pages and pages of dialogue describing some historical event! Horrible. I don't know how a novel like that could even get PUBLISHED, much less given praise. I can't believe it's compared to Diana Gabaldon's writing, because as much as DG gets far too into the history for my taste, at least her novels are complex and full of showing, rather than telling. Nearly all the characters and the plots of TWS left me cold or rolling my eyes. I hate to tell C what I really thought of it, though. She loves everything I've ever recced to her, and I know she really wants me to like it. Siiiiiiiiiigh.
jade_okelani is going to be here in ONE WEEK. How is that possible?! Eeeeeee! I still have a lot of cleaning and organizing to do, for my own sanity, because Jade has already said she doesn't care.Now that it's the end of May, all the TV shows are wrapping up, and I have sooooooooo much to catch up on. It's exciting and overwhelming at the same time. Over the long weekend I managed to finish all of Fringe S4.
- I'm sorry to say I've lost significant love for this show. I still enjoyed it just fine, but I didn't feel that extra something that makes me want to marry it.
- I found a lot of the mythology stuff confusing and incoherent, but I fully admit that that could just be me. I never was able to follow along with the XF stuff all that well either... though XF did a better job of keeping me interested despite that. But for instance, it never made any sense to me why Peter disappeared to begin with. Why would joining the two universes cause him to disappear? It's not like he erased the original timeline or anything. So logically that was nonsensical to me.
- It turns out that I find prime!Lincoln Lee extremely uninteresting. :/ It's not like I'm a rabid Peter/Olivia shipper (I like the two of them as individuals, and since they want to be together, so be it), but trying to force some romantic tension between prime!Lincoln and prime!Olivia never felt right to me. I mean, is it necessary for Olivia to become romantically entangled with ALL of her partners?!
- On the other hand, I did very much like alt!Lee, and was bummed that they killed him off. For what purpose, I can only assume is so that prime!Lee had a place to go when Olivia remembered Peter/her original life. Honestly, I'd rather he have died instead of alt!Lee, because alt!Lee already had a great relationship/romantic tension with alt!Olivia.
- I've decided I don't like calling alt!Olivia Fauxlivia because she's not really faux, is she? She's just as much Olivia as prime!Olivia is... just because she's from a different timeline doesn't mean she is somehow false while the other is real. They're separate but equal.
- I'm pretty meh at the idea that basically everything that happened in the 3 seasons that came before this one was... erased. That even the same cases can be repeated (like the porcupine monster), characters that died show up again, etc. I don't have any particular desire to do it all again, you know? That none of that ever happened. Or that now they'll be better at those cases because they've done it before. Also it seems like a really lazy way to take back all the stuff they apparently realized had gone too crazy/astray (such as alt!Olivia having Peter's baby).
- I really liked ep 19, where we get a glimpse of the Observer-ruled future. I had fun with that ep (and to see Desmond from Lost!), though I would have liked to have seen more Peter and less Walter. I think that's a pretty consistent complaint of mine, though -- MORE PETER. I can't believe we had to wait 4 episodes just to see him again. Joshua Jackson is just one of those actors who I find very likable, like Josh Charles or Matt Czuchry. ANYWAY, back to this ep. I find it disheartening that Olivia was nowhere to be seen. :/ Does Walternate still kill her? But wasn't that part of the other future, the one that doesn't exist anymore? Plus Olivia "died" at the end of S4, doesn't that count as her "death"?
- If the Observers have already experienced everything already anyway, what is the point of the ones that come back to witness the stuff? They know that their own kind eventually take over the planet, right? If they're trying to help mankind, why don't they warn them about THAT? Maybe that only came about later, when Peter changed things? But we see them at that point too, discussing Peter being erased, and anyway, THEY seem to be able to know that things were changed; THEY remember Peter and the original timeline. So I don't see how they wouldn't have known all along about what happens in 2015.
- I could see the "I'm pregnant" coming a mile away. I can't imagine that I was the only one, given ep 19, though there were a few moments when she looks uncertain/unhappy and I thought she might have some bullshit excuse for why she and Peter needed to break up. Anyway, that, like sooooooooo very many things in this show (basically, all the supernatural stuff that doesn't deal with the parallel universe mythology), reminded me of The X-Files -- that moment when Scully tells Skinner the same thing in the hospital.
- I really hope they do something awesome with the last season.
I'm also halfway through Glee S3! This show. When I'm not watching it I feel extremely ambivalent about it. Then I watch it and it sucks me in all over again, mainly because the song-and-dance numbers are so wonderful. The plots, however, are just as much drivel as they have always been. Easy resolutions, characters that do and say things pretty much to serve whatever "plot" has been introduced in that episode, etc. It's a total trainwreck. I still find Rachel and Finn EXTREMELY uninteresting, but it's still better that they're together rather than not, because when they angst about being apart it's even more torturous.
I'm glad to see Mike Chang get something resembling a plotline, though it's something straight out of Asian Dead Poets Society. They still way overuse Rachel, and while I totally love Brittany and Santana, I'd still like to see them spread the love a bit more. Poor Tina NEVER gets any solos. Or Quinn. I like Kurt, but I'm just not a fan of his singing. At all. Which is more than I can say for Finn, who I basically don't like in any way. Puck getting it on with his baby's adoptive mother was just so BLAH. Seriously? I still love Quinn, and am glad that she dropped the whole crazy thing where she was trying to sabotage Idina and get Beth back, but her arc, just like all of them, happened too quickly -- it wasn't earned. None of their resolutions are earned. >< Anyway... I really, really like the new Irish guy, and can't stand Sugar.
I've also seen the first 8 episodes or so of Parks & Recreation S4. I love this show. Ben and Leslie are so cute. And Ron's the best. So far this season I can take or leave the rest of them (OK, Anne and Chris can stay). Even though everyone looooooooves April, I'm on the fence about her. I usually waffle between liking her and hating how mean she is. (Santana is a little too mean for my taste as well, but I like her much more than April.) Yeah, that's pretty much all I have to say. :)) Funny show is funny.
Also, of course, there's the latest Game of Thrones episode, 2x9 'Blackwater.'
-
akscully is right, you can totally tell that GRRM wrote this episode, because the characters feel more authentic, in what they do and especially, what they say.- Really loved all the interactions between Cersei and Sansa in this ep.
- Thought the confrontation between the Hound and Bronn was kind of WTF though. I don't think that happens in the books and I'm not sure why it happens here.
- Sansa/Hound yayyyyyyyyy! Really liked that scene, though it made no sense in the books why she didn't go with him, and it makes even less sense in the context of the show. She stands a better chance of surviving with him than with staying in the pit of vipers, especially since she comes to the realization that he would never hurt her.
- OK, I don't know how ANYONE could survive that wildfire attack. It looked like it had blown up and consumed EVERYTHING, when you watch it from afar with Tyrion. And yet close up people are still running around. And obviously it was survivable since we know that several characters DO survive it. It just didn't look that way from afar at all.
Did I mention that I finally received The Walking Dead compendium from the library? I would have loved to have gotten it even a month ago. Now with my Avengers obsession I really couldn't care less. >< Sigh. And I've waited SO LONG for it.
Finally finished reading The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley. It was recced to me by K's friend C, who LOVED it, and it's also got plenty of other accolades. I was totally underwhelmed by it. It's a work of historical fiction with two tepid (to me) romances, and far, far too much of the novel is pages and pages of dialogue describing some historical event! Horrible. I don't know how a novel like that could even get PUBLISHED, much less given praise. I can't believe it's compared to Diana Gabaldon's writing, because as much as DG gets far too into the history for my taste, at least her novels are complex and full of showing, rather than telling. Nearly all the characters and the plots of TWS left me cold or rolling my eyes. I hate to tell C what I really thought of it, though. She loves everything I've ever recced to her, and I know she really wants me to like it. Siiiiiiiiiigh.
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I don't think I've ever noticed family-si8zed tea bags before. I'll have to look for it. Any specific kind of tea? Like is it just black breakfast tea, aka Lipton or something?
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