Sunday, 4 July 1999:

A Little Glum

Today I finally finished the first campaign in Starcraft. I'd been stuck on the last scenario (of ten), which took me three tries. It was tough, you have to be meticulous and you have to plan ahead. It took a long time. It's an accomplishment to have finished it, I think.

Was that the high point of my day? Well, sort of. Actually, Mom called me this afternoon, saying she didn't think she'd called me yet at my place out here, which may be right. I've called her and Dad quite a bit since I moved out here. Mom says it's really humid back east, and the heat will probably join it soon. Humidity is the worst; even fans don't help. If you don't have A/C, there's not much you can do. Anyway, it's always nice to get a phone call.

I did some house chores, and then I continued with something I did on Friday: Watched some of the high points from Babylon 5. I have all the episodes on tape. Here's what I watched:

  1. The council scene from "The Long Twilight Struggle".
  2. The battle sequence from "The Fall of Night".
  3. The big battle sequence from "Severed Dreams". The high point of the whole series, for my money.
  4. The battle sequence from "Walkabout", mainly because I love it when G'Kar shows up at the end.
  5. The battle sequence from "Thirdspace".
  6. The battle sequence and denouement from "Into The Fire".
  7. The battle sequence from "No Surrender, No Retreat".
  8. The battle sequence from "Endgame".
  9. Most of "Rising Star".
  10. Most of "Objects at Rest".
  11. Most of "Sleeping in Light".
Yes, it was mostly a special-effects extravaganza.

The fest drove home for me that the new series, Crusade, is essentially redundant because Babylon 5 accomplishes (more or less) what it set out to do: Told the essential story of its universe from beginning to end, and worked through most of the themes and character issues in that story. Crusade not only isn't necessary from a standpoint of that story, it's frustrating because it doesn't tell the story of any of the details which were (deliberately) left unresolved in B5! Like the Telepath War, or David Sheridan, etc. I imagine it eventually has something to do with the Drakh War, but it's an awful roundabout way to deal with it.

It also reinforced for me how haphazard the last season-and-a-half of B5 was, and how much less effective much of the story was due to circumstance: Sheridan's story isn't nearly as interesting as I envision Sinclair's would have been had he not been written out. And Ivanova's absence is keenly felt in the fifth season. Finally, "Sleeping in Light" almost seems an unnecessary coda after "Objects at Rest". The latter wraps everything up with a forward-looking view, while "SiL" comes off as overly maudlin and downright depressing. (If Sinclair's arc had continued through to the end of the series, it would have ended on a somewhat more upbeat note.)

Still, there was lots of great stuff there. A terrific SF series.

Unfortunately, as often happens when I watch the last few episodes of B5, I got rather down afterwards, thinking thoughts like, "Will my friends come to visit me in my last days, decades from now?"

I often feel like my life is insufficiently dramatic, and wonder if all the TV I watched and comic books I read as a kid have something to do with that. I may be setting too high a standard to realistically live up to. Similarly, I sometimes wonder if I'm not entirely happy unless I'm feeling depressed or in conflict about something. Guilty if I feel too happy, or something. It's a nebulous collection of feelings I'll likely be grappling with for years to come.

But, of course, I like being happy, being in a comfortable place with relatively little conflict, but with lots of interesting things around to engage me. But some piece of me wants to go in the other direction.

In the evening I decided to go up to Borrone to read, but when I got there it turns out it had closed early for the 4th of July. I did mark its hours and tried to look at it in the light of, "Hey, I can go tomorrow night!"

I stopped in Kepler's Bookstore, right next door, and did some browsing. I ended up buying a collection of the comic strip Mutts, which I've discovered in the newspaper out here. It's quite good, with a smooth, simple art style. It hearkens back very much to strips from the early part of this century, especially Krazy Kat, with its sparse, affected dialogue, though it's more accessible for people at this end of the century.

Basically, it's about a cat, Mooch, and a dog, Earl, and their adventures together in their neighborhood. They get philosophical sometimes, but always in the not-the-brightest-light-in-the-heavens nature of animals, and they periodically display animal traits (like falling asleep at the drop of a hat) in the middle of the meanderings.

There are four collections; if you like the on-line stuff, you might check one of them out.

Stopped by Apple on the way home to check on something, and discovered that my building's main entrance wasn't recognizing my key. But I managed to get in through a different door. Weird. I wonder if it was manually locked for some reason?

I nearly started doing the dreaded "redesign" on my journal, but didn't get to it. A redesign, for those of you who aren't plugged into the journalling "community", is simply a change to the visuals and perhaps the structure of a site. Many people do them to exercise their art skills, or because they feel like it. Being me, I want to do it to improve the utility of the site, to make the front page more readable, and the entries a little easier to navigate.

I'll probably keep the purple-and-blue basic color scheme, though. I like it. I'd like to get some new fonts, however. I wonder if Apple has a server with a bunch of free fonts on it? I don't really want to pay for fonts - I use them relatively rarely - and I don't want to steal, so freeware is the way to go. Or maybe I'll check out some web sites. Who knows?

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