Oh, the snark! I am filled with squee.

I generally hate these Moral Stupidity episodes, but this one isn't just about "our heroine learns a lesson," so, you know, that makes it better.

Besides, snark. And Jabba the Human as MOTW, and Big Bad plottiness, and Faith.

And snark.

Cuddy doing one pole dance is one pole dance too many.

That is all.

Some people say that season three is when Buffy finally gelled. Others say it was the last good season. So on this season, at least, everyone is in agreement. :p

Anyway, fewer long-winded paragraphs than the last Buffy post and more bullet points:

( Monsters and metaphors and mean guys, oh my )

Thus far, this season has been about recovering from last season’s finale. Yet we’ve also quietly introduced the characters - Faith, Mr. Trick, the Mayor - that I suspect will be the big action this season. In fact, judging from last season, we should expect a sledgehammer to the head any episode now.

Note: I’ve seen all the episodes through “Amends” (ep 10), so spoilery comments for anything before then are fine.

So I'm done with school - woohoo! No diploma yet; I'm not staying for commencement, so they'll be mailing it to me, sooner or later. I'm now packing and I move out Tuesday, so expect light (read: no) blogging for a week or two.

I've been tagged by ahmedakhan:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Since I'm sitting on my bed as I write this, you get the following thrilling excerpt from Numbers, chapter 6, verses 19-21:

And the priest shall take the the boiled shoulder of the ram, one unleavened cake from the basket, and one unleavened wafer, and put them upon the hands of the Nazirite after he has shaved his consecrated hair, and the priest shall wave them as a wave offering before the Lord; they are holy for the priest, together with the breast of the wave offering and the thigh of the heave offering. After that the Nazirite may drink wine. This is the law of the Nazirite who vows to the Lord the offering for his separation, and besides that, whatever else his hand is able to provide, according to the vow which he takes, so he must do according to the law of his separation.

Just for context: In Hebrew law, when someone made a Nazirite vow it meant that they were voluntarily setting themselves apart for God for some fixed amount of time, say 30 days. During this time they didn't cut their hair, drink wine, etc. And while the paragraph above uses "he," it's a generic he; the beginning of the passage explicitly says that either a man or a woman could take this vow.

No tagging from me; feel free to tag yourself if you're so inclined. (You can even blame it on me, if you want an excuse! (g))

If that wasn't a word before, it is now.

mrissa has just posted her April reading roundup, and she has some interesting comments about Scott Westerfeld's YA "vampire" novel: Peeps read to me like a science fiction novel about people with parasites that happened to mimic some but not all aspects of vampirism. The passages about different parasites were gross and engaging and fun, and served to underscore the point that this is an SF novel, not a horror novel. Well-done and worth the time.

I think I know what she means about SF-vs.-horror, or SF-vs.-something-else, because when reading non-SF I frequently have troubles with (for lack of a more specific term) the worldbuilding. A cool or bizarre premise is presented and milked for its coolness or weirdity, but without ever following through and figuring out the consequences of that premise.

Case in point: the vampires in Buffy (at least so far). My favorite parts with Angel are the ones exploring just what it's like to be him, a vampire with a conscience (besides woeful and despairing). He doesn't breathe; he spontaneously combusts in sunlight; he rose from the dead to become undead, an experience that he only describes as "pretty disorienting" and "weird to go through." For two and a half seasons I've been waiting to explore just how those constraints would affect someone's thought patterns, their daily nightly rhythms. What kind of perspective would that give you? How does that shape your interactions with others? But so far, Whedon seems supremely disinterested in exploring this kind of psychological stuff.

I had the same problem with Alma Alexander's The Secrets of Jin-Shei. She posits a social custom of deeply committed bonds between pairs of women and a written "women's language," but as I mentioned in my original review, she never really explores what these premises would mean for society as a whole. Instead we see what it means in one extraordinary special case. I didn't much care about her specific group of girls (a problem in itself); I wanted to see the whole thing.

Or, to leave spec fic altogether, Victoria Thompson's Gilded Age NYC novel Murder on Lennox Hill is one of the least historically-grounded historical novels I've ever read. It's not that it feels modern; it feels like it's not set in anytime in particular, despite the occasional mention of gaslight. What's it like to actually live in New York during the late 1800's? Who knows? If the characters do, they sure aren't telling.

I think I get this penchant for social exploration from reading science fiction. Or else I read science fiction because it looks at things this way; it may be a chicken-or-egg question. Look at Dune: for all its other flaws, it paints a fascinating landscape of a desert society with a profoundly different viewpoint from, well, mine. Or to return to urban fantasy, one of the things I loved about Carrie Vaughn's first Kitty novel (I haven't read the others) was the very kind of psychology that Buffy lacks, albeit for a werewolf instead of a vampire. Being in Kitty's head is a bizarre experience sometimes. (For an appetizer, see the Kitty short story "Winnowing the Herd" over at Strange Horizons.)

I suspect that to some extent, I'm simply reading the wrong non-genre books. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of historicals that actually explore the psychology and social mindset of the timeperiod; I just haven't found many yet. Similarly, there is some fantasy that looks at this aspect, like Vaughn. If y'all have others in mind, I'm definitely open to suggestions.

I just saw "Lover's Walk" and there is *no* justification for liking a drunken British murderer/vampire with girlfriend problems as much as I like Spike in this episode. Especially when, in the middle of battle, he gives Buffy a big long speech about the secrets in the Depths of her Soul. Hey, if your sworn enemies can't tell you the truth...

Also, I seem to have missed a knit row on my wrap, so something like eight pattern repeats are backwards and I must tink them all. Grump, grump.

So, through my last review we’ve seen twenty-four episodes, just barely over a full season’s worth. Things have gotten a little dark sometimes: various anonymous people have died at the hands of vampires and other monsters; Buffy spent a little too long facedown in a pool (in the underground chamber of DOOM) in “Prophecy Girl;” Ms. Calendar has just about stopped speaking to Giles due to the events in “The Dark Age.”

But compared to the last half of season two, those episodes are dark the way huddling under your blanket with a flashlight is dark.

( Who turned out the lights? )

When I started watching this show I expected it to be funny; I expected some good emotional moments; I expected to enjoy looking at David Boreanaz. (There. The truth comes out.) But I didn’t expect to respect the show this much. I am honestly impressed with the sense of tight control and the impression that anything, however small, might turn out to be significant. I feel as though the writers are paying attention, and that in return my full attention will be richly repaid. It’s a heady feeling.

EDIT: Comments welcome, as usual. No spoilers season three or later, please.

Today I got edits from Marti at Aeon for "Wild Among Hares," which has been moved up to Aeon 14, due out in May. Aside from being exciting to do anything having to do with the publication of my words, it was nice to do something writerly. Between the end-of-semester work and craziness and the coping mechanism for same (ie, Buffy), I haven't managed to do anything writing-wise since my ghoul story two weeks ago. So it was nice to do something, even if all that meant was fiddling with the ending.

Why, that would be me.

That's the hard part. All that's left now is some classwork, and then this Sarah will have an M.S. in mathematical sciences, oh yes she will.

So I’m almost through with season two, but I have enough to say that it’s worth breaking my season roundup into two parts. This post covers general thoughts and episode commentary for “When She Was Bad” (ep 1) through “Bad Eggs" (ep 12).

( Spoilery thoughts and commentary )

Despite some grumpiness above, I really am enjoying the series. Honest. :)

I've seen all of season 2 except for "Becoming," so spoilers in the comments are fine for anything before then. I'll post Part 2, erm, later. Next week, prolly.

Apparently I don't have quite enough to do, because I've made another foray into the ancient pop culture that everyone knows but me - Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this time. I've just finished the first season, and ( have a variety of thoughts (spoilery and otherwise) )

Feel free to jump in and comment as you like, just no spoilers past the first season, please. If Giles is smashed flat by a thwomp in season two, I'd rather not know yet.

I am a very seasonal reader. I first read Dandelion Wine in the summer, and about the middle of June every year I get the hankering to read it again. Late fall and winter are for British anything - Dorothy Sayers, Jane Eyre, Neil Gaiman. (Gaiman is also good for airport reading, as is, for some reason, Robert Charles Wilson.) I tend to read Shakespeare around Christmastime.

And, every year for the last several years, spring has been for poetry. I took a shoddy creative writing class my last year in undergrad that was supposed to be half-fiction, half-poetry; in fact it was more than half-poetry and much of the poetry time involved the professor talking about poets and name-dropping. But he did read a lot of modern poetry to us, which led me to Roethke, for example. And then the same spring I read A.S. Byatt's Possession, which sent me haring off to read the Romantics: Blake, Coleridge, Shelley. (Although I'm not sure why, as the poets in Possession are writing forty or fifty years, I think, after the Romantic period.) And the next spring again: Shelley, Byron, and then later to Browning and a little bit of Tennyson and Eliot.

And now it is spring again, and I have just come from the library with collections of Galway Kinnell and of Wallace Stevens. And I am happy. :)

I can only do math homework for so long. Then I say, Oh, I'd like to go write, I haven't written in so long (like, a week or two). And then I say, Sarah, if you have enough initiative to write, you have initiative to work on this math thing. And then I don't do the math thing or the writing, and I watch half of CSI or something instead. Lame.

So last night I took out the latest writing challenge for a mailing list I'm on, and suddenly I had written half a very short story about a ghoul, of sorts. And this morning I wrote the other half. And I'm a little ambivalent about overall piece - a ghoul, Sarah? Really - but it's got some phrases that make me happy.

So, chalk up one more rough draft for the year and I think, with a very little polishing, a final draft as well.

If only stochastics homework would go so well. Could somebody pour some intuition about Poisson processes into my brain? Please?

Why hello, mysterious box from HarperCollins. Why are you in my mailbox? What? A copy of The Yiddish Policeman's Union?

Wait, I did sort of enter a contest a while back, but I was paying more attention to The New Space Opera they were raffling than the Chabon. Besides, shouldn't somebody have told me I won before sending it to me? Although that one guy emailed me for contact information - I guess that should have been a clue.

So, shout out to the nice folks at Eos Books for a surprise free book.

I've been faithfully reading Shadow Unit, and it occurred to me that not everyone has heard of it yet. So, here it is: a TV show written in novella form by such talented writer-type folks as Sarah Monette, Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, and others. Bear has explained it as "more or less, the website for a serial drama in internet form. Or possibly it's a fan site for a TV show that doesn't exist."

It's thriller, police procedural, X-Files with coherence and an ensemble cast and most of all good writing. That's really what I'm reading it for.

If you're so inclined, Shadow Unit is also playing with viral stuff - there are Easter eggs all over, for example, and four of the characters keep livejournals. But that's side stuff; it's the fiction that's central.

Last week and next week are the Weeks of Writing Not Fun Stuff, such as a master's project paper and a master's project presentation, as well as homework assignments in two different classes, a test, etc. In particular, I'm signed up to speak at the graduate student seminar on Monday about my master's project, which means I need slides by Monday!!! So I am learning the LaTex package Beamer this weekend. I now have about 25 very pretty, mostly blank slides; putting stuff on them is tomorrow's job.

Meanwhile, I really do want to finish my circus story because I've got a new story idea that's been less and less polite in its requests for attention. But tell me, gentle reader, does the world really need yet another story about an adolescent bonding to an animal? Even if the author is hugely enjoying the worldbuilding behind it?

And in other news, I finally saw A Scanner Darkly last night. It had some fairly amusing lines but was ultimately incoherent, despite a last-minute attempted injection of plot. Perhaps it would have made more sense if I'd ever managed to finish the book? Or perhaps not.

Jay Lake and John Scalzi have both weighed in on homeschooling recently, presumably as a result of the recent dustup in California about requiring homeschooling parents to have teaching credentials. Scalzi is politely disinterested in the concept, Lake is vehemently (and more-or-less politely) opposed.

Some points I'd like to refute:
( long rant )

When the gmail ad clip at the top of the screen says "Biggest sales book ever," that is different from "Biggest book sales ever."

Also, "Giant gas fields" are not the same as "Gas giant fields," and have nothing to do with huge star systems blooming with bright Jupiters and Saturns. Sadly.

A long time ago, Benjamin Rosenbaum wrote a really awesome thing refuting the idea that if your story is genre, then it should be impossible to tell without genre. I first came across this idea in Lewis, of all places, in his essay on science fiction. I disagreed with it then; it never seemed fair to me that just because I wanted to set my story in Spaaaace, it had to be the kind of story inextricable from the Spaaaace setting.

Anyway, I'm linking to this now because tonight is the second time in the last four months or so that I've gone googling for Rosenbaum's post, which takes forever because I keep thinking Paul J. McAuley wrote it. So now I know where it is.

I don't get outside lj that often, and the vast majority of my lj friends are writerly types who talk about writing, genre issues, books, and movies - all topics I ponder a lot and blog about myself. I was complaining to a friend about how few blogs I read outside those main subject areas and how I know there are all sorts of neat blogs out there that I have no idea how to find. "Why don't you start a meme?" she said. So, here 'tis:

1. List 5 blogs that you read regularly/occasionally, and explain why they're awesome.

2. Leave a comment in the post from which you got the meme with a link to your post, so that people can see follow the chain and see what you posted. (This is ultimately self-serving; I'm much more interested in everyone else's cool blogrolls than in mine. )

Mine:

• Tetrapod Zoology: a blog on zoology both real and speculative, by a real live zoologist. He's got a post up now about "How Intelligent Dinosaurs Conquered the World", but my favorite post was his post-300 exploration of the evidence for war rhinos.
  
  
• The Middle Ages Get Medieval, an occasionally-updated blog containing "Weekly articles, reviews and rants about Medieval History and the Middle Ages, from a PhD with attitude." Written by fellow WOTF-er thesnowleopard and full of in-depth looks at such sunny topics as Medieval confessions under torture, as well as excursions into researching the Middle Ages and critiquing coverage of Nostradomus.
  
  
• The Language Log, "Weblog run by University of Pennsylvania phonetician Mark Liberman, with multiple guest linguists." Not only do the bloggers delve into all sorts of juicy language details, they snark about them, too - see for example the first couple of paragraphs of "Colon Rage". Originally found via jaylake
  
  
• Asking the Wrong Questions: Abigail Nussbaum reviews a wide smattering of material, from Jane Austen to the entirety of Deep Space Nine to my personal favorite, her annual reviews of the Nebula and Hugo short fiction nominees (example here; this year's aren't up yet). Nussbaum, occasional reviewer for Strange Horizons, is intelligent, thoughtful, and thorough. I'd pay money for her reviews. They're that good. (available as an lj feed here)
  
  
• And now for something completely different: Wittingshire, a blog about living a quiet Christian life in the modern world, sprinkled with poetry (last week was T.S. Eliot week, it seemed), book reviews/excerpts (I discovered Leif Enger's beautiful Peace like a River through Wittingshire) and thoughtful thoughts on all sorts of things.
  

vaughan_stanger and I were just talking about how Nancy Fulda's AnthologyBuilder project makes for good publicity. Now I have evidence: a very happy-making review by ahmedakhan on my story "In Walked a Goblin," which was published almost two years ago in a small press mag on the other side of the world. Who'd a thunk it'd ever see the light of day again?

I have done a truly spectacular amount of internet surfing research today. You should all be impressed. You should be even more impressed that I also managed to finish up a long stochastics homework and make good progress on a stats homework. Not quite as much as I wanted, but eh.

Since I assume no one wants to know what I did with Markov chains or the Breusch-Pagan test, I'll offer a few fruits from the research surfing (all more-or-less related to a story I presently may or may not be writing):

Wikipedia on Nigerian Americans (woefully inadequate - I'd be grateful to anyone who could point me to a better source on the patterns of Nigerian immigration to the States in the first half of the 20th century. Academic Search Premier is giving me no help on this one)
GoogleBooks excerpt of a book, The Nigerian Americans, that might be that better source, other than being a bit overheated
Sword swallowing and its side effects, article in the British Medical Journal and winner of an Ig Nobel award
Dictionary.com on deglutition, the one thing sword "swallowers" don't want
Nautical Tattoos (colorful, but of dubious accuracy)

A market head's up: BU slush reader Nancy Fulda says subs open May 1.

Robin Hobb has posted an amusing rant about why writers shouldn't blog. Basically, her point is that blogging is not writing. slushmaster (from whom I snagged the link) suggests refinements to the rant.

Interesting reading, and I agree with most of Hobb's points, yet here I am on LJ. Presumably I don't need to justify my presence to you, my fellow LJ-ers, but it is this: for me, it's a fantastic place to make and maintain friendships with other writers. As far as I'm aware, I've never met a fellow spec fic writer in person, someone who was actively writing and submitting and worrying about being published. You guys out there are a big part of my support group.

Aw. You can feel all warm and fuzzy now. :p

So, like the title says, I subbed my 200th (and 201st) sub today. Yay! I mailed out my first submission in March of 2004.

If we can't measure success by sales, we'll use whatever metric is handy. :p

You only need an itsy-bitsy bit of Spanish to appreciate this song, and it is really funny. Watch.

What is it with you and cop shows? Why would the viewing public of America need three Law & Order series, three CSI’s, plus Criminal Minds, Cold Case Files, Numbers, and Bones? Not to mention that CBS is now running Dexter on Sunday nights.

Is there no other setting in which drama might occur? Can we not at least have ourselves a little speculative fiction without investigating murders along the way? Clearly not, because Fox’s new show New Amsterdam features a poor old guy who can’t die or age until he meets “The One” woman of his life (I kid you not, TV - don’t you remember okaying this show? What were you thinking?) and who is, in the meantime… a homicide detective.

Arrrrrgh!

(And yes, TV, I do recognize that you also set dramas in hospitals, and I appreciate that you presently confine yourself to three. However, this does not address my point.)

In response to the Rumor Mill shutting down, j_cheney has set up an LJ community to serve as a "temporary" replacement of the Rumor Mill's Rejection/Acceptance Log.

I live in an itty bitty college town and the local "real" theater is half an hour away. However, we have a discount theater just ten minutes' walk from my apartment. I suspect this place is reminiscent of the movie theater experience, say, thirty years ago. It must be at least that old, chairs and furnishings included. Tickets are always $2. The theaters smell like cigarette smoke, even though smoking hasn't been allowed in the building in I don't know how long. And, since it plays movies between two weeks and several months after they're first released, you never know what they'll be playing on any given week until you see the marquee Friday morning.

I kind of like that element of suspense, and I definitely like the ticket price. It explains why I've seen things like Shoot 'Em Up (Clive Owen!) and Alien vs. Predator 2 in the theater - it's cheaper than most rentals, for goodness sake, and anyway there's no rental place within walking distance.

Of course, sometimes you have to wait a long time to see a movie you want to see. (Or not - they played Cloverfield two weeks after it opened.) Case in point: I'd been watching for I Am Legend for months, and I just tonight got to see it.

This is another example of a movie I watched because of the trailer. I loved those big open scenes of desolate NYC, of the deer running between skyscrapers, of Neville (Will Smith) golfing off the wing of a fighter plane. That's what they showed in the trailer, and that's really all I hoped for.

Which was good, because there wasn't much else to the movie. It should say something that the movie got boring as soon as the zombie-creatures showed up. The zombies themselves were nothing special, Neville wasn't taking any particularly interesting precautions against them, and Neville himself hadn't enough depth as a character to carry the movie alone. Then, there's an attempt to insert God into the discussion, a cheap thematic trick to give the illusion of depth to an unfortunately shallow film. Then we have some tragedy and some triumph and voila! the movie, she is done.

I should point out that I do not object to intelligent discussions of God and belief in film (or any other form of narrative, for that matter). This was not intelligent. I believe in God and hold to the basic tenets of the Christian faith, and for that reason I tend to be a little sensitive to unearned use of the God card. If you're going to do it badly, leave it out. (On the other hand, if you do it well I may forgive you other egregious rediculousness, such as aliens with a water allergy.)

Tangent aside, the best and worst I can say of this movie is that it was bland, mawkish, and predictable. I rate it 4.5 out of 10.

EDIT: I do have to say, though, score 1 for the gratuitous and uncredited appearance of Emma Thompson. Like Morgan Freeman, that woman manages to lend dignity to anything she's in.

There's an announcement up that the Rumor Mill has been taken down, along with its parent site, Speculations. I'm sorry to see the Rumor Mill go. It's where I first met a lot of the folks that I now know through other venues, like jkratman, aliettedb, ckastens, jimhines, and others that aren't coming to mind now. And though I haven't been active in the general discussions for a long time, I still posted my rejections and checked the market threads. It was a handy place to trade news.

I'll just say it again: I'm sorry to see it go.

In order of publication:

Midnight Never Come, by Marie Brennan (swan_tower). June 2008
Why: Fae! Spies! Intrigue! In Elizabethan England! And written by someone who obsesses cares about getting her historical setting right.

All the Windwracked Stars, by Elizabeth Bear (matociquala). October 2008
Why: Norse Steampunk. 'Nuf said.

Knife: A Faery Tale, by R.J. Anderson (rj_anderson). 2009.
Why: I like fairies - not the sticky-saccharine kind and not necessarily the fierce nasty Old Country kind, but the kind that are people in their own right, never mind that they're only yay high and live in trees and have wings. From the first chapter of Knife (available at the link above), I think Anderson's fairies are exactly that kind.

So, I have discovered American Idol. I mean, I'd heard of it before, I'd even seen 30-second bits of it now and then, but for some reason this season I'm actually turning it on on purpose, like last night while I was cooking taco meat. And I've come to some conclusions:

1. I like rock better than pop. I suppose this isn't really news - I already knew I didn't like pop. But I didn't think I liked rock that much better. However, on any given night the people singing rock are the people I like. Period.

2. Corollary to 1: I like Amanda Overmeyer, punk nurse chick on a motorcycle, a lot.

3. David Cook, lover of words, is obviously a man after my own heart (as opposed to the guy who drag races or the guy who sang in an a capella group or whatever - all cool things, but not cool things I love). I liked that they actually showed previous footage of him using various fun words. This does not make him boring.

4. Corollary to 3: Simon Cowell, who thinks loving words is a boring self-descriptor, is neither a man after my own heart nor very intelligent, really. He's not witty; he's just brutal. He clubs people over the head with criticism where Gregory House (frex) would use a scalpel. (But it's probably not fair to compare him with a fictional character, is it?)

5. I had another thought, but it left. If it comes back I'll let you know.

Yes, it is - here. Yay!

If you only ever watch one movie about vicious genetically-engineered sheep whose bite turns people into weresheep, then Black Sheep should be it. Due to a childhood accident a twenties-something New Zealander suffers from a profound fear of sheep, but when his brother offers him millions to sell out the family sheep farm, he returns home to pick up the check in person (at the urging of his therapist). Meanwhile, an environmentalist rebel with a beatnik's grasp of hygiene accidentally looses a genetic experiment gone wrong. His not-girlfriend and the sheep-phobic farm boy find themselves on the run from nasty sheep, nasty scientists, and his nasty older brother while trying to warn the old homestead of the impending doom.

As I told my friend, I could have done with significantly fewer intestines during the course of the movie. But - oviniphobia! New Zealand! WERE-SHEEP! How could you go wrong?

And while we're talking about "horror" that no one's ever heard of, I want to mention The Frighteners, a quirky little comedy horror with pre-LOTR Peter Jackson and pre-retirement Michael J. Fox. Tell me if you're heard this one before: a guy can see ghosts and freelances as an exorcist - by having a couple of ghostly friends haunt places so that he can go exorcise them. A pretty good gig if you can get it - until a seriously nasty ghost shows up and ruins the show.

This is fun stuff. The first half is fantastic, and although the second half gets too serious even it has some fun moments.

And because I feel like it, I'm also going to mention Dead Again, which is the movie Alfred Hitchcock would have made if he believed in reincarnation. Although he would have known better than to cast Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh as Americans. It's still fun, and there's a surprise small role by an actor who really ought to stick to small roles, because he's so good at them.

And indeed I did finally finish "The Tinyman and Caroline." I just sent it out to Eclipse, fingers crossed. Big thanks go to everyone who helped me work (and work and work) on this piece, including lj-ers aliettedb and ckastens. Yay!

I wonder what I shall do now. Ah, yes, I shall finish writing my resume, which is not nearly as much fun. But necessary. *sigh*

In other news, my story "In Walked a Goblin," from ASIM 25, is now up at AnthologyBuilder.

I always meant to write you a fan letter and tell you how much I've enjoyed your acting over the years, but I never actually mailed one, and now it's too late.

You brought an a sense of dignity and sincerity to every role I ever saw you perform, from blockbuster Jaws to the nearly forgotten Blue Thunder. More importantly to me, for two years you captained my favorite submarine, the SeaQuest. As Nathan Bridger you grounded fantastical, unlikely plots with humanity and humor. You were the highlight of the defining TV show of my childhood and for that, and for all your contributions artistic and otherwise, I wanted to say thank you.

It looks like