amatara: (Tribble terror)
Even if, admittedly, I haven't been posting a lot, I have the impression from the Livejournal stats that not many on my flist are still reading me there. On the other hand I have no idea how many of you are following me on Dreamwidth, only that lately I tend to get more comments here than on LJ, so here's the question: how would any of you feel if I stopped cross-posting from DW for some or all of my posts?

I have a paid account at LJ now, but I might consider switching taking a paid DW account instead when it expires. And obviously if everyone is reading me on DW (or wouldn't mind reading me there in the future) the added value of cross-posting to LJ becomes pretty thin.

Same, in fact, with posting full fics here instead of just linking to AO3. I quite like having the stories here, and I really enjoy getting feedback on my own journal, but if everyone skips over to AO3 anyway I might as well save myself some time and just post a link. I'd really like to know what you people think about that.

Apparently one can't put up a poll on DW without a paid account, so I set one up on LJ instead. You'd do me a huge favor if you'd just hop over to the poll and tick a few boxes there. Thanks so much y'all!
amatara: (Default)

Just a small question first, that doesn’t have anything to do with everything else: is someone here familiar with the series Crossing Jordan? It’s an NBC crime-drama-ish type of show revolving around a team of forensic pathologists, and I just recently bought the first season on DVD. Bought it in an impulse, one might say, mainly because since my Twin Peaks re-watch I appear to have the hots for Miguel Ferrer   I read that it was pretty good and we needed something new to watch anyway  it was ridiculously cheap in Media Market  Okay, I did buy it because of Miguel Ferrer, right? *blushes furiously* And it was incredibly cheap, but that wasn’t the reason, just a mitigating circumstance. *smirk*

Now the thing is, watching it – I actually am rather enjoying it, for more reasons than the obvious one. *g* For one, the main character Jordan is a kick-ass woman with an attitude, a screwed-up past and great dialogue. Secondly, her two main relationships, at least at the start of the series, are not of the romantic kind, nor do they involve stereotypically young and stunning guys. Instead they’re her dad and her boss. (The boss is Miguel Ferrer, by the way, in a role that couldn’t be more different from Albert Rosenfield except for the being a pathologist too, and he and Jordan have terrific chemistry. Not of the romantic kind, but I love it even more for that.) Anyway, turns out the only season out on DVD is the first one. There are six in total, so I was wondering (A) if it turns out I’m addicted to this by the end of season 1, what do I do? Are there, perchance, any European TV stations broadcasting this? Are there other options? And (B) are the later seasons worth going through all that fuss for in the first place?  Anyone able to answer even part of those questions will have my everlasting gratitude.  

*grins*

All right, that was that. Now for what I really wanted to talk about. Every so often, I find myself drifting back to the topic of hurt/comfort and why I (we) enjoy it. What I keep being amazed about is how personal it all is – not just in whether the genre pushes ones buttons or not, but also what specifically pushes those buttons. Seeing character A be crudely poisoned may well do something for me, but it could send you away screaming. Similarly, if you enjoy characters B and C sharing a room during a vicious flu outbreak, it may give you warm fuzzies, but maybe it leaves me all stone-cold. I’ve posted about this once before, and what I took out of that was that h/c, to me, is a kink, plain and simple. Which doesn’t mean I have no standards for it. J I’m generally a pretty picky person where fic is concerned, and that goes even more for my kinks. And while I have no trouble at all appreciating well-written fics that are about the h/c and nothing else, character exploration is also a big part of it for me. H/C can, after all, be a great trigger for a lot of deep stuff (she says, innocently *g*)

So, what I find very interesting is how different we all are in our, ahem, preferences. In fact, I think nearly every discussion that could be had about sexual kinks, could be applied to h/c as well, and exactly what does something for one person but not for someone else, now that fascinates me. So here’s a little poll for y’all, just to see how different or similar we all are. *g*


Poll! Part 1. )
Poll! Part 2. )
amatara: (Default)

I just came to a bit of a surprising conclusion. Well, no - I'm sure I've come to it before, but it's never really been as obvious as now. Said conclusion being: my compulsion to watch (or re-watch) a particular show is not at all proportionate to
#1 my opinion of said show's quality
#2 my enjoyment of said show during watching
Right now, I'm in the middle of catching up with several shows that are pretty new to me, and re-watching some others, and I've noticed that the pattern behind which DVD box I pick up on a particular night isn't quite what I would have expected.

For instance, last week when I was home sick, I gave Stargate Atlantis a try. SGA is one of those shows I never quite dared to watch - I'd always been a bit puzzled by the statements from fans saying they love it despite it not being that great, and the fact it's just about the top fandom on AO3 made me fear it would be - well, not that great, and overhyped, which... *scratches head*. So picking it over another show was purely random. And the thing was, I didn't find it that great, really. It was okay, but not overly well-written or overly original. Yet somehow - and I still can't quite believe I'm saying this - once I started watching, I couldn't stop. I even started looking on Youtube for vids and scenes from future seasons, and went hunting for fic, which I very rarely do actively (I'm a bit of a rec scavenger, really). And I don't even know why, apart from that the characters appeal to me, but... *boggles at self*

On the other hand, there are shows which I think are very well-made, and that I enjoy very much, yet the tempo at which I get through them is achingly slow because for some reason I don't always feel like watching them. Farscape is one example - I love the atmosphere, and the music, and the concept, and I like the characters well enough, but I don't get that more more more reflex and I don't know why. Then there's Star Trek: DS9, which I am enjoying more and more now we're into the second season, but there's no urgent compulsion to watch either. I'm wondering if that is because I don't have a favorite character (yet), because I'm very much of an emotional watcher, and connections to characters are important to me - but that's such a silly reason I don't know if it's true. Doctor Who is one of those shows where a season gets "consumed" rather quickly, as is Lost, but I'm guessing that's more because I buy them season per season, and am always behind on the rest of fandom, which helps to sharpen the urge. So far I've never re-watched any Lost or DW episode, and I'm pretty sure if I had to get through the entire series in one go, I would get stuck somewhere in the middle, never mind how brilliant I'm finding them. And I still don't quite understand why some two years back I raced through Babylon 5 at such feverish speed - it's a great arc show, but that can't have been the reason, nor the Narn and Centauri stuff, because I raced through the Earth and Minbari episodes all the same.

Such strangeness, I think, calls for ticky boxes!

[Poll #1539397][Poll #1539397]

On an entirely unrelated note, Some RL stuff is still going on that I'd like to sigh about for a moment. )
amatara: (Default)
First and foremost, wishing you all a wonderful New Year! May you be granted enough wishes, great or small, to fill your daily cup of happiness, yet still be left with plenty of others to keep you dreaming in years to come. [Poll #1506013][Poll #1506013]
amatara: (Default)
Just finished watching, in a slightly chaotic order, DS9's first season, Stargate SG-1's fifth, and everything we could find of The Big Bang Theory (which was, of all the comedy shows I've seen over the past years, the one that made me laugh loudest and most often! Engineering and physics jokes made me all nostalgic, *sigh*. Not to mention the references to various obscure and less obscure fandoms - game of Klingon Boggle, anyone?).

The logical next question is, which show to watch now? Unfortunately, said question isn't so straightforward to answer, given that I just received a whole hard drive's worth of sci-fi series from a gracious colleague and co-geek, and husband got half a hard-drive's worth of mostly comedy shows from one of his colleagues not so long ago, which we're still only halfway through. So, dear flist, I was hoping you could give me some much-needed advice. Below is the list of possible choices. Which shows, when you watched them back in the time, exceeded your expectations? Which ones have you watched a dozen times and still haven't grown tired of? And which made you wail and curse because you thought they were crap but couldn't stop watching anyway?

[Poll #1488525]
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