Miscellanea Exotica

I decided to skip everything and jump straight to the finale. My reaction is short and does not even require a spoiler cut.

1. Jensen was prettier than usual.
2. Jared was hotter than a thousand burning suns.
3. Sam was the awesomest awesome that ever awesomed.
4. I still don't give a fuck about the angels.

So, yeah. Status quo, basically. My original plan was to fast-forward through every scene that didn't have Sam in it. I decided against this. Does it count as spoilery, given my utter indifference, at this point, to every character other than Sam and Dean and mostly Sam, that I wish I had just gone ahead and done that? I don't think I would have missed anything except Jensen being pretty. It is a genuine shame that he is 100% not my type.

Will go back and watch skipped episodes some other time.

So, I think I'm going to skip the ep reaction this week and move straight to the meta. This is part because I'm insanely busy this weekend, and partly because I think my reaction to this ep is a little hard to quantify, if you know what I mean.

( Spoilers for 6x05 with reference to 6x06 previews )

Um, this got kinda long. Oops? I have to say, my emotional engagement this season is a little hit or miss, but my intellectual engagement is still right up there.

So, I was going to do an ep reaction for 6x03, but it started turning into a rather long-winded meta, and I got sidetracked in the middle, and now I'm just too tired of the damn thing even to look at it. And this is a much more interesting topic, anyway.

( Meta and speculation for Sam, with some reference to future episodes. )

I just can't win.

As of this 14th day of September, Anno Domine 2010, I have as follows:

96 Supernatural
162 RPF
23 Merlin
43 Various and Sundry Other

fics sitting in my To Be Read folder.

And I'm flipping aimlessly through the internet, looking for something to read. I was clearly a cat in a previous life.

Once upon a time, back when I was but a mere tweeny-bopper, I watched Babylon 5. I actually began watching at right about the time that Season 5 was getting started, but back then, B5 was to TNT as Law & Order currently is. I was able to get a pretty good idea of what was going on through the reruns as I watched the fifth season first run. And lo, I was confused. The show that I was watching in reruns was awesome and epic. The show I was watching in first-run bore almost no resemblance to that other one. Several years later, when I finally got online and become involved in the already-fading B5 fandom, I learned some of the details. The show's creator, JM Strat-however-the-fuck-you-spell-his-name, henceforth known as JMS, had had a five-year plan for his show. This plan was an epic story filled with fascinating characters. However, making this show was something of a rocky road. The obstacle that concerns us here is that, going into the fourth season, the network sort of let it be known that this was the last year for Babylon 5. JMS was determined to finish his story, though. So he squeezed all the rest of his epic story arc into the fourth season. And that was it. All the major plot arcs were resolved. Several major characters died or left. Those that were left were in places of resolution. It was a series finale, and a brilliant one at that.

Then, at the absolute last minute, the network decided to renew B5. Disaster. There was no more story left to tell. The epic was over.

What to do? They had to do something, so they just muddled through. I can only assume that they hoped that whatever they could come up with on the fly would match the brilliance that had come before. If that was indeed their hope, they failed. Season 5 was a trainwreck. Beloved characters were missing. They were replaced with new characters we didn't care about. Some of the remaining characters acted in such OOC ways as to be essentially destroyed. Most of the plots were boring. It was painful to watch.

That said, Season 5 wasn't an unmitigated disaster. I frankly though that the Londo/G'Kar/Centauri Prime storylines were excellent. "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari" and "The Fall of Centauri Prime" are among my favorite episodes of the entire series.

So, this is how I saw it. The story ended in Season 4. That was it, that was the end. Nothing else counts. Season 5 was an addendum, and counted for no more than any of the various spin-off movies or tie-in books. Which is to say: cherry-pick. Any little bits of canon from those sources that you like? Keep. Anything that annoys you? Dump. As far as I'm concerned, the Londo character arc, the Londo/G'Kar friendship arc, and the Centauri Prime story arc all absolutely happened. The Lenier character arc and the telepath story arc absolutely did not. Everything else happened, but I just don't think about it.

And so, I'm happy. I get to pretty much jettison a miserably bad extra season while keeping any bits that turned out to be good.

This is essentially the attitude that I'm taking going into SPN S6. Is it inevitable that season 6 will be as much of an abject failure as B5 S5? No, not at all. I am, in fact, hopeful. But even if it does turn out to be terrible... who cares? The epic story line that'd been building since the Pilot is over. Everything that happens from here on out is extra. If it's good? Keep it. If it's bad? Dump it. Simple.

All that being said, I'm not sure why everyone's flipping out over the spoilers. Pretty much everything I've read so far sounds pretty good. There's one or two things that give me pause, but even those things might turn out not-so-bad. And there are a couple of things that were mentioned that have made me out-and-out excited.
( Cut for spoilers, just in case anyone actually somehow reads this )

When you come right down to it, I am a geek. Specifically, I'm a geek who loves lists. Kind of always have been. When I was, say, about eleven, I decided to pull out a notebook and make a list of all the books I owned, title and author. For the record, I'm pretty sure the number hovered around 800. Yeah, I had a lot of books. But, see, knowing how many books I had, and which books they were, and where I had them stored (I had so many, I had to be rather creative in regards to storage) wasn't enough. I had to know how many pages they all had, and how much that added up to. So I spent days going through every book I owned, writing down the page count, and then even more days going through with a calculator adding it all up. And then I wanted to know how many words that was, so I started trying to come up with an estimated wordcount per page. Looking back on it, I might have been (and might still be) just a little OCD.

When I got my first computer, and discovered spreadsheets and databases, well. Things started getting a little out of hand.

Then I got into fanfic and discovered del.icio.us. My obsession with tagging is actually a little frightening.

In the spirit of my obsession, I spent a couple of days going through the upcoming Big Bang descriptions and posting dates, and created a database of the ones that I thought looked interesting. I'm currently resisting the temptation to start creating multiple tables and adding several new fields of descriptors, like: Have I read anything by that author before? If so, did I like what I read enough to save it to delicious? If not, did I like it, but just not enough to save it? Am I interested in reading the fic because the description sounds good, regardless of the author, or am I willing to look at it because I trust the author regardless of whether I found the description interesting? Or is it a fic with an interesting description written by an author I trust? Am I really eager to read the fic, or is it just something I'll take a look at? And so on.

But anyway. My point is that I figured out how many Big Bangs I'm currently planning on at least attempting to read (112, for the record). And that got me thinking. I still have a bookmark folder filled with fics (mostly Supernatural and CWRPF) that I want to read but haven't had a chance to get around to. The folder is quite large. I'll never ever lack reading material. But, I knew that a few of the fics in that folder were Big Bangs from previous years. So, I decided to go through and tag all them, to see how many. It took all night, but I finally discovered that I still have 38 Big Bangs from 2009, and 11 from 2008 bookmarked and waiting to be read.

But figuring out how many I had waiting to be read was not enough. It got me thinking: how long would it take me to actually read all of those? And wordcounts are much more useful in figuring that out than just numbers of fics (after all, a fic of 100,000 words would take considerably longer than one of 20,000). So I went through every one of the Big Bangs that I have bookmarked, and put the wordcounts into a spreadsheet (separate columns for 2009 and 2008), and added it all up. I have 2,158,612 words (give or take, since most of the given wordcounts are approximate, and even I'm not obsessed enough to go through all of them to get accurate counts, even with my handy-dandy wordcount addon for Firefox) worth of fic to read. In addition to the 112 fics (minimum of 20,000 words each, so a minimum of 2,240,000 words total, with an absolute guarantee that pretty much every single one of them will be over the minimum, with many of them being considerably over) for this year.

And still my obsessive geekery is not satisfied. I have read that the average mass market paperback holds an approximate average of about 300 words per page. My own investigations (which involve pulling random books from my shelf, counting the words from a random line on a random page, and multiplying it by the number of lines on the page) suggest something closer to somewhere between 400 and 500 words per page. In the spirit of compromise, I decided to divide the wordcounts by 400. Which means that for previous years' Big Bangs, I have approximately 5,397 pages worth of fic to read. At an average of perhaps 400 pages per novel, that's about 13.5 novels. For this year, there will be a minimum of 14 novels worth of material. If I assume that the average wordcount for this year will be similar to last year, and that the 49 wordcounts that I currently have in my spreadsheet offer at least a semi-valid sample, then the average wordcount will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 44,053 per fic. So, for 112 fics, that's 4,933,970 words. Which boils down to about 31 novels.

This has actually been kind of embarrassing. I swear, I'm not actually obsessive compulsive. Except possibly where it comes to my delicious tags -- 16 bundles holding 1,498 tags might be a little excessive for most people, particularly given how often I feel compelled to go back through my 800 bookmarks to add entirely new descriptors.

And for those of you playing at home, this post has been 957 words long.

So, I took my SCM final this morning, and was absolutely shocked to discover that I actually knew what the fuck I was doing. Kind of a new and exciting feeling when it comes to my accounting classes.

Also new and exciting is my new-found enthusiasm for Sam/Castiel. Well, not so much new-found, really. I've been fond of at least the idea of the pairing ever since the angel first made his appearance. It's just that, until 5x14, what little interaction Sam and Castiel had was distinctly hostile, and until 5x18, Castiel has always been entirely too focused on and taken with Dean for me to be able to really buy him with Sam. However, I found Castiel's big scene with Dean in 5x18 (you know the one) to be cathartic in the extreme, and my affection for the angel currently knows no bounds.

And, I may have read With Nothing (Left) Up my Sleeve by fakeplasticsnow, which was utterly awesome, and really let me believe that the pairing is plausible post-5x17.

Finally, I had an odd dream last night. It took the form a fic, and it began like this:
( Cut for embarrassing silliness )