FRANS

• I have now watched until episode four of Babylon 5. My continuing deep thoughts are thus: I like Delenn's whole aesthetic because the colours of her clothes and lipstick are pretty; at the moment I possibly want Delenn and Sinclair to make out, but maybe I just want Sinclair to pash almost everybody, because he's dreamy; I find Garibaldi kind of annoying.

• Trying to research something for a story, and it's surprisingly hard to find information on what people in different military ranks actually do. It would probably be easier if I were looking for information on the US military branches, but I've been looking up stuff about the ADF. It seems easier to find info about the army and joint combat operations than the RAN or RAAF, so far. Probably the problem is that I just don't know where to look to find this. Maybe I need to find a children's book about this? I couldn't find anything I wanted in my local library because it didn't seem to be under military history, and thus far my google searches haven't thrown up much. It's one thing to talk about military ranks like we all know what they mean, but what does an Air Marshall actually do? I don't even want to find interesting stuff, just stuff like, how much paperwork does each rank land you with each week, & etc.

• The City Library seems to have moved everything around in non-fiction so things are still under Dewey Decimal Numbers, but the 300s are mysteriously right next to the 900s, and they're not in numerical order in general, and, sigh, hard for me to navigate. I feel like 'Don't make me think' should be the rule of information navigation design in general, mostly because I don't like change!!!

Speaking of TV as time capsule (which I was a few days ago), I bought the box set of Starsky and Hutch DVDs, because every time I caught a repeat here and there it was an entertaining show, and I feel like the pilot episode tells me everything I need to know about the mid 1970s. The procedural plot and snarky dialogue haven't really dated but the whole aesthetic is like a California version of the kind of 70s neo noir Taxi Driver would be doing a year later, but also (like in the sauna scene) somewhat reminiscent of those old BBC productions, which is kind of hilarious. And the homoeroticism starts off strong hahaha.

And the first DVD of Babylon 5 also showed up! I watched the first episode. I wonder how I'd feel about this show if I'd actually seen it in the 90s. Watching it for the first time now, twenty years later, a lot about it seems stiff and stage-y and it takes a while to warm up. The SFX have not aged well, as expected from a show from 1994. I expect it to feel somewhat Shakespearean in its drama as it goes on. I saw someone somewhere recently say that contrary to what they expected, Babylon 5 has dated, and Deep Space Nine seems kind of visionary, which is interesting to contemplate, but also a good place for me to confess that I've never seen any of the mytharc episodes of DS9 other than one episode about Odo and one about Kira so most of what I watched of that show was traditional Star Trek cheese.

Anyway, the bits I really liked were the three scenes at the end - especially the one between Ivanova and the hot blonde psychic about the Psi Corps. I already really like the psychic (even though she mentioned her name in her first scene I've already forgotten it because I've a brain like a tea strainer), which is largely down to the relaxed energy of the actress.

I've also re-watched something like ten episodes of the Lilo and Stitch TV cartoon, which is a cheesy, watered-down version of the good bits of the original film, obviously, but it does pick up as it goes along. The Halloween episode brings up Nani's adult fear of losing access to Lilo but also goes for tired sexist jokes like 'Pleakley's worst fear is his overbearing mother' and 'Jumba's worst fear is his overbearing ex-wife' which, please, this is a kid's show, spare me. Yin Yang, where the two new experiments find their place together as friends, balancing each other out, and Yapper where the experiment is a dog Mertle adopts, and Jumba and Pleakley act like a regular tourist couple in that human-clothes-theme-dressing way they do, are better than I remembered.

Interesting film-related YouTube videos I watched lately:

The Revisionist World of Disney: Mary Poppins, Walt Disney, and Saving Mr. Banks by Lindsay Ellis, a video I was linked to by a friend and which says some really interesting things.

SCANLINE | The Power of VHS by hbomberguy, which has a lot to say about the fortunes of film horror from the 1970s to the 1990s, and also early CGI.

• I went to the Hokusai exhibit at the NGV today! Beautiful prints. I was worried I was going to run out of time to see it but it turns out I needn't have worried - it's been extended a week. If you can I'd suggest not going on a weekend because it was extremely crowded and the area it's in is all narrow corridors so it's extremely slow going to get through. That was bad for me because I get claustrophobic in slow moving crowds. It was also annoying because people would stand right up close to the prints so literally nobody else could look at them because their heads were in the way, and some prints I could only see through someone's phone camera, because the rest of their body was in the way. I didn't read the placards, just looked at the prints, because I figured I could buy the exhibit book to read all that stuff (and I did buy it and like most gallery exhibit art books it will probably sit on my shelf never actually getting read). They had two lovely prints of the Great Wave off Kanagawa, which is what most people were there for, but the flower prints and the bridges were also really beautiful.

Now that my office has moved and I'm not really crossing the city any more, I haven't been going in so much, so walking through the Bourke Street Mall at 11am actually felt like I was being a tourist in my own city. I went into the City Library to pick up a bunch of books that looked interesting at a local book store but that I can't afford to buy (lol, sorry local store) and I went into Dymocks that was full of awesome books I can't afford to buy. Seriously, the hardcover of Aaronovitch's RoL novella was more than I pay for a prestige paperback of a full size novel; there is seriously no way I'm paying that much for a novella. I'm deeply behind on my book stack, anyway,.

• The first DVD of SG-1 arrived before any of the other DVDs I was waiting for (I blame AusPost, not Quickflix, tbh), so I watched the first episode last night after finishing my celebrity studies essay.

Here's what little exposure to Stargate I had before this:

1. I'd randomly caught five minutes here and there of SG-1 on TV over the years, not enough to have any idea what was really happening, but enough to know that (A) I wanted Sam and Janet to make out, (B) a vague idea of what happened to Daniel's wife, and (C) MacGyver is in it. (I guess I have to say the original MacGyver now that there's a new MacGyver TV show.)
2. A girl I met the first time I went to uni back in 2002 told me she wrote Jack/Daniel fic and I was shocked that she shipped Not James Spader with The MacGyver Guy because, like, omg, Richard Dean Anderson is so old!
3. I saw the original movie at the cinema, and remember passingly little of it, other than the main plot points. In fact, if I had not read a Tor.com post about it recently, I'm pretty sure all I'd remember is Space Egypt, James Spader strangely attractive in bandanna, hot space wife.

So, here are my thoughts on the first episode:

- It's probably a good thing I didn't watch this in 1997 but it's a fascinating time capsule of clothing and set design. Jack's gigantic baggy leather jacket! Remember when that was the cool design for what leather jackets could be like? A lot of the visuals remind me of Xena, actually, because I guess that was what sf/f looked like in that time period when it wasn't gothic horror.
- Michael Shanks with floppy hair is so cute. So so cute. Possibly it should be illegal to be that cute.
- Christopher Judge is also really beautiful at this point.
- Sam Carter showing up and geeking out about everything is great. I've already decided she's the best one. The bit where she and Daniel meet and say nerdy things at each other while all those military people around them stand there looking confused is great. I loved that.
- I love the unsubtle use of re-purposed footage from the movie for desert planet, the name of which I do not remember.
- And then they visit Vancouver Planet, which I suspect is the kind of planet they'll visit a lot.
- Wow, I was not at all prepared for how genuinely awful the stuff with Daniel's wife is. The extremely gross rape and murder subtext, combined with the way the naked blond lady was filmed from behind or hidden by conveniently placed objects, but non-white brunette lady gets full frontal nudity for the scene where she's rendered unable to fight and then brutalised. That is extremely gross.
- The nonsense planet hopping is cool, though.
- After that surprisingly emotionally intimate scene between Jack and Daniel at Jack's house I am not at all surprised that became a monster slash pairing in its time.