nineveh_uk

I loved it. It isn't perfect - for me, episode 5 is definitely the weakest - but its flaws are essentially those to be expected from the book, and after waiting for decades I am delighted that this is the imperfect version that we get. Right, coherence isn't working: bullet points it is. There's a lot of 'I love' in here. Also some adaptation spoilers.

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The Good Omens TV series is released on Friday.
All six episodes are released at once.
My father is visiting Friday - Monday.*
My father and I have many shared tastes, but one that divides us is that he is seriously allergic to anything that smacks of SF/fantasy. He also doesn't really care for Monty Python. He is completely unable to read Terry Pratchett.

You can see the problem.

Dad would have no objection to watching an episode with me, but if there is one thing I do not need in life it is watching the first, untested episode of a Pratchett adaptation with my father there thinking "Why is my daughter watching the rubbish?" He wouldn't be able to help it any more than I could in a similar situation. He would no doubt be happy to make himself scarce. Or I could, as I had planned, watch it first thing in the morning on the laptop, and that would be perfectly manageable. Except now I can't because there are six episodes at once and that is simply impossible.

And the true kicker? The one with that extra-special demonic touch?

I was the one who suggested it would be a good weekend for him to come. This weekend was also an option, but I will be working Monday and suggested that the travel home would be grim on the bank holiday. That'll teach me to be considerate.

I am going to miss the immediate fannish discussion. I am going to miss the immediate wank.** And above all, I am going to have to use superhuman levels of self-restraint not to get spoiled before I have the opportunity to watch it all. My soul is going to be severely tarnished on the envy, greed, and wrath fronts.

*We are going walking.
**Not entirely a bad thing, but I fear that fandom wank has a tendency to increase. It's not like "are Victor and Yuuri engaged?" has got less contentious over time.

Found while googling for random Good Omens-related things: Crowley Young Chartered Accountants. Address, 10 Berkeley Street.

As a general comment from one who has been whiling away some of her sick leave this week having a look at GO fanfic for the first time in ages, I have to admit that I am not entirely looking forward to the increase in fandom activity that next year's TV series will doubtless bring... On the one hand, increased volume and discussion is great. On the other, people might be Wrong on the Internet! Though I had to admit that as someone who enjoys a bit of good old-fashioned smarm for this one, Sheen and Tennant's recent Comic Con interview is very encouraging: It makes it so much easier as an actor to go ‘my objective in this scene is to not show you how much I love you,' and just gaze longingly at you all the time'. (3 mins in)



TL:DR I like the trailer. For me, the biggest problems hitherto with Pratchett adaptations has been that they've tended to be stodgy, and this looks like they might have avoided that.

After some truly filthy weather earlier in the week when I was visiting my parents, finally today managed to bring a couple of hours in which warmth, sunshine, and the absence of rain coincided. I would say, "Long may it continue!", but it is forecast to rain tomorrow. On the plus side there continues to be no need to mow the lawn.

A swift state of the Nineveh:

* I read Soul Music last week and realised that I had never previously finished it. Teenage me was annoyed that it wasn't all about a girls' boarding school, and knew nothing about rock music. I still don't know much, but I got a lot more references. It's not one of Pratchett's best, I felt that although all the cast are potentially interesting it doesn't go deeply enough into any of them. However it is good fun and happily, Susan would get more developed in later books. I think that it may be time for a re-read of early middle-period Pratchett.

* I have made a sweatshirt out of this Liberty fabric with pink icebergs on it. I am rather smug about my successful essay of an exposed zip. OK, it would have been better if I had made a winter-themed sweatshirt in autumn rather than spring, but I shall wear it this weekend and then it will be ready in six months time.

* I am finally watching Skam, to be precise season 3 of Skam, which is the one that reached international fandom. It is as good as reported, far more teenager-ish teenagers than one often sees, and with outstanding acting. I shall certainly post about it when I've finished the series.

The Good Omens TV adaptation cast has been announced. It's not Youngest Sister and my fancast of David Thewlis and Paul Bettany, but we'll take it: Michael Sheen as Aziraphale and David Tennant as Crowley. Roll on 2018 (but not the Apocalypse).

I’d been wondering what to take with me in addition to the first Lymond book, thinking of just loading the Christmas Kindle with Austen (there can never be too much Austen). But now I think that this is not the year to cut down on shoving a load of novels in the rucksack* after all. Along with the books on skiing, Animal Tracks and Signs**, and a small dictionary, it feels like the thing to take is several Terry Pratchetts.

The first Pratchett I read, courtesy of the recommendation of an English teacher who had few merits, but did introduce me to both Pratchett and David Eddings, was Mort, which I think is fairly typical of Prtachett fans of my generation. It’s not that I don’t enjoy its three predecessors, but Mort didn’t actually expect the reader to know anything at all about fantasy to get the most out of it. Re-reading it last year I was struck by how different it was from even ‘early-mid period’ Pratchett, but if it’s a series of jokes strung together it is a series of really, really funny jokes. It is inventive, it's fun, it's tremendously engaging, and it is surprisingly serious beneath it all. Less surprising when one has read the later books.

I love Terry Pratchett’s novels. I haven’t actually read every single one – there’s a lot, and I’ve gone through periods of being less interested, or when his writing changed and I wasn’t up for that, and rediscovered them again later and found that I liked them after all. That’s to my benefit now, I suppose***. He is clever, and witty, and fun, and profound, and often extremely angry. I didn’t always get all the references; I wonder if Soul Music might work beter for me now with an extra decade or so’s general knowledge. At least that experience makes me less annoyed when people completely miss the point of Unseen Academicals, which I love.

I’m not sure that I have a favourite of all, but I always love Carpe Jugulum, which for me stands poised between the more rollicking earlier work, and increasingly dark and serious later. So have a favourite bit of it. Incidentally, one of the pleasure of good writing is the new impression each time. On this occasion I find myself focussed on the full significance of the word “domestics”. Whilst retaining, of course, a due snigger for the final pun.

( ‘Why, Miss Agnes Nitt,’ )

And then we cut to Granny's wrestling in the dark with Death - and something much worse. That's the other thing about Pratchett, he's not just fun of good ideas, vivid imagery, great characters, he's technically fantastic, too.

*Especially as I have a new rucksack. I have spared you the saga of picking a new skiing rucksack: be grateful.

**Magnificent.

***I have all the Tiffany Aching books awaiting me.

I am enjoying Pratchett’s Going Postal a great deal more on the second read, and can only conclude that I can’t have been in the mood for it the first time round and was mostly disappointed that it wasn’t something more in the Carpe Jugulum vein. I adore Carpe Jugulum, but I’m glad that this time I’m also enjoying Going Postal. I must finally buy The Fifth Elephant, and dig out that idea for Vetinari/Margolotta fanfic.

Department of the old ones are the best: having nearly filled my digibox recorder with old episodes of Frasier (must switch off the series record now I think I've looped round to the beginning again), yesterday I reached the one in which Frasier finds himself backing a candidate for Congress who confesses to having been abducted by aliens. Splendid as ever.

My office is in a converted hospital building, and my particular office is in a converted hospital ward, which dates to 1770 and has graffiti from 1776 on a windowpane to prove it. It is rather nice as a result, with a high ceiling and big windows. It is also rather noisy when windy, with lots of wuthering going on – cue my colleague saying “And when you weren’t in on Monday and it was really windy it was very spooky, and I suddenly remembered that this was a hospital and people must have died in this room”. I suppose it puts a different perspective on annoying emails.

It is the 21st March tomorrow. Alas, it will definitely not be spring.

I’ve just finished reading Unseen Academicals, which I enjoyed a lot. I had seen some lukewarm (and that is putting it generously) reviews on LJ (and much more enthusiastic ones elsewhere), but then people on LJ appear to like Moist von Lipwig and I don’t. I enjoyed the football and the complexities around what Vetinari is doing with it, the focus on some new characters, and the glimpse round the back of Unseen University. I always enjoy Unseen University, in this case, the agonies of the Archchancellor having to treat as an equal the treacherous colleague who has actually applied for and got a job* elsewhere, at a different, new, and thus by all that UU holds dear, inherently inferior, institution.

Inevitably I like Lord Vetinari, and inevitably I like Lady Margolotta, and thus, inevitably, I like Vetinari/Margolotta though I am not convinced that they actually are, ahem, these days. So I wrote my first discworld fic. The end contains implicit spoilers for (some of) the end of Unseen Academicals.

*Bear in mind that there are still plenty of people about who don’t think one should have to do anything as vulgar as apply for an Oxford professorship. Interviews only became a requirement in the nineties.

Fic I

( The vampire Lady Margolotta did not drink ... wine )