Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Nothing Useful to Say

I'm taking a personal leave day from the blog to deal with a vague but nevertheless disconcerting case of ennui.
The kind of ennui that comes from having too much time on one's hands and too little will to find something productive to do?
Yes, Merriam-Webster, that's exactly what I'm feeling right now.  I think maybe I'll get a bowl of ice cream, then go watch some Voyager reruns or something--It's been a while since I've done that, and it sounds like a nice, low-energy, brain-relaxing thing to do.  I'm gonna start with that episode where they encounter a race that has no concept of music, and the Doctor becomes a super-celebrity.  That was always my favorite...



(Regular posts resume Friday)

9 comments:

  1. Well, if you want something that doesn't use your brain, can't do much better than Voyager. But at least it doesn't cause your brain cells to kill themselves like Enterprise.

    I know the feeling. It's what I'm stuck in right now. I have a chapter that desperately needs to get done, but I can't muster up the will to actually do it. I was actually more productive when I didn't have tons of free time; at least then I was able to prioritize and get stuff accomplished. Stupid unemployment...

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  2. Hm. Enterprise was merely meh for me. Not horrible, but some wholesale recycling of older plots. Voyager outright pissed me off more often. I found Janeway to be an utterly irritating character, and most of the rest were bland (Paris, Tuvok, Chakotay), overblown and melodramatic (Torres), or saccharine (Kes, Neelix). Robert Picardo was one of the few bright spots that pushed it into being watchable. He and Seven, though their stories were essentially the same: machines learning to be human. Ugh, now I'm having flashbacks of the awful time travel police episodes they felt obligated to revisit every so often. I understand that the idea was to return to the feel of the original series, where every week gave us some new alien race and some new exotic locale. To some degree, that worked, but it kept lapsing into arcs where they broke from that. At least the one with those creatures from fluidic space was pretty cool.

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    1. It was like watching Star Trek fanfic. And not in a good way.

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    2. Voyager was great, as long as you skipped the episodes about the Borg... and Species 8472... and about Tom and B'Elanna's relationship... actually, anything primarily about either of those two characters... and all the episodes from the first few seasons where they were trying to "feminize" Janeway... and all the Q stuff...

      Okay, Voyager was great if you only watched the thirty best episodes or so.

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  3. My favorite episode of Voyager was 'Muse,' the one where Harry and B'Elanna crash on a planet and the people there make plays based on their logs. The playwriter guy manages to pull a lot of meaning out of the few words he heard, and what B'Elanna tells him and I loved that. I like to think that it's sort of a comment about fanfic, in that while a story can say one thing, fanfic can say the same thing about the setting, but they can say much more because the people who enjoy it can read so much into it.

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  4. That describes me pretty well. My hours have taken a huge cut, in part due to ObamaCare and partly the jealousy of lazy union bums. You'd think I'd use all that extra free time to get some projects done, but no. That Weapon Vs. AC chart remains as incomplete as ever...

    I never got into Star Trek. I've seen four films (the first two, First Contact and the Abrams one) and bits of the episodes, but I'm mostly familiar with it through references. I also received some Trek cards as a gift when I was younger, likely because someone assumed it was basically the same thing as Star Wars, which I very much was into. There was also that fanfic I'd rather forget...

    Anyways, I did enjoy Wrath of Khan, so maybe I should give the show another, more serious shot. Not like I'm doing anything productive with my time, right?

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    1. The only Star Trek I ever watched was when I decided to do a marathon of all the Q episodes, because after Discord I started seeing more and more clips of him from the shows and wanted context.

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  5. I can't help but feel like the whole "structured procrastination" thing is really coming into effect here. When you have lots of things to do, you procrastinate on them in order to focus on things like fan fiction. When you suddenly find yourself with tons of free time, then you find yourself just slipping into a state where you don't feel like being productive.

    I should know, because I'm in that state now. I don't feel like doing anything, yet I have all the time in the world to do it. Laziness begets laziness, I suppose.

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  6. Voyager is kinda meh for me. I'm more of a Deep Space Nine fan. Ether way have fun procrastinating. =)

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