a vintage year for scoundrels

Since it is nearly 2016, here are some things that made me happy in 2015, sorted vaguely by category. There were probably more, but I can't remember what they were right now.

SUPERHEROES
- Peggy Carter, punching people so pleasingly, and realising that trying to win the respect of her male colleagues is trying to win a rigged game. If they don't value her, that's THEIR problem.
- Kara Danvers, dorky ray of sunshine and superpower.
- Jessica Jones, bruised and cynical and fundamentally heroic.
- Kamala Khan, noblest of dorks.
- Carol Danvers, punching the sky. The last issue of her comic made me cry; I am looking forward to seeing her have space adventures with Abigail Brand next year.
- Possibly stretching the definition of "hero" a tiny bit, but Loki: Agent of Asgard was one of my favourite comics of the year, despite the endless crossovers it got tangled up in, and I am sad it's over.
- Age of Ultron gave me NATASHA and WANDA and MARIA and HELEN, and also some boys, some of whom were also quite good, and it was GREAT. And then purplefringe made Wolf Like Me, a beautiful Natasha vid, and everything was excellent.

SPACE DORKS
- I played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and fought a lot of lightsaber battles and lost a lot of money playing Pazaak and it was GREAT. Also this one time I found a gong and I clicked on it and it went bong. (I ask for very little in a computer game.)
- kathkin's lovely Second Doctor era fic made me very happy this year.
- seeing "The Trouble With Tribbles" and "Trials and Tribble-ations" (aka "Kirk Is Super Done With Everything About Today" and "Jadzia has the best day ever") with many excellent humans.
- reading Una McCormack's The Crimson Shadow and still wanting to draw hearts around it months later, for reasons of GARAK, and also ( spoilers )
- my gaming group is slowly starting to work its way through Mass Effect. I AM EXCITE.

BOOOOOOKS
- Sarah Caudwell's Hilary Tamar mysteries, recommended to me by raven, are a gem: witty and delightful.
- I read Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor the other day and, oh, my heart. People trying to be kind and to act rightly in difficult situations. ♥
- I followed Tansy Rayner Roberts's Musketeer Space, a retelling of The Three Musketeers, but with lots of women and queer people and brown people, and also set in space, as it was being serialised, and I loved it SO MUCH. Highly recommended! I want to read a million more things like it.

OTHER
- Hamilton! I feel like I have nothing to say that hasn't already been said at length elsewhere, but I really love it and am so excited about the fact that I'm going to see it next year. :DDDD
- Sense8! I didn't talk about this anywhere, but I really enjoyed it. I loved that it took its time and really immersed us in the characters, and I liked (almost) all the sensates and their associated humans a whole lot.
- Person of Interest's Sameen Shaw. PRECIOUS VIOLENT WEIRDO. <3
- KORRA. The last two seasons were SO GOOD.

*Monstrous Affections ed. Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant
X-factor: Breaking Points
X-factor: Short Stories
The Vagrants - Yiyun Li
Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors - Brian Hayles
X-factor: Change of Decay
The Princess Curse - Merrie Haskell
Hawkeye: L.A. Woman
Star Trek/Doctor Who: Assimilation2 Volume 1
*Murder Most Unladylike - Robin Stevens
Vixen: Return of the Lion
The Red Panda: Mask of the Red Panda
Fool's Errand - Robin Hobb
Saucer Country: The Reticulan Candidate
Loki Agent of Asgard: I Cannot Tell A Lie
*World's Finest
*Spirits Abroad - Zen Cho
*Hild - Nicola Griffith
*Rat Queens: Sass and Sorcery
Sex Criminals: One Weird Trick
Doctor Who: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible - Marc Platt

( I read a disproportionately high number of comics this month )

I also read the Sleepy Hollow miniseries, but since Boom don't seem to have announced the trade yet I can't list it properly, grumble grumble. Anyway, it was pretty good, definitely recommended to fans of the show (who don't mind that lieutenant is spelt leftenant in all of Ichabod's dialogue /o\). The backup stories by Noelle Stevenson were particularly delightful.

First of all, thank you for making me a vid! I am sure I will love it. ♥ I've written a few things under the cuts below about what I like in vids, and about the fandoms I've requested (in some cases slightly expanded from my optional details), but feel free to ignore it all and just vid the vid you are happiest with! Basically more vids in any of these fandoms will make me happy.

( vids in general )

( requested fandoms: Babylon 5, Doctor Who (1996), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Press Gang, The Sapphires (2012), Swallows and Amazons (1974), Ultraviolet (TV), Wonder Woman (2009) )

I think that's all the things I wanted to/ought to say (though I might come back and try and say some more things about what I like about my fandoms, as on reading it back I don't appear to have said much that's particularly helpful, whoops). YAY FESTIVIDS!

Or, in which I attempt to distract myself from dissertation angst by wittering on about last night's Downton Abbey.

• Most of this is going to be grumpy, I think. I am enjoying watching it still, but in a way that I am also enjoying complaining about it. (Mostly enjoying complaining about it.) Not quite hatewatching, more like grumblefun.

( probably spoilers, I expect )

And now back to the blanket fort of dissertation denial.

Hmm, I was not overly delighted with the finale. I'm not quite at the "I diskard it uterly" stage yet, but many of the things it is currently choosing to be do not please me.

(Disclaimer: I was not entirely paying attention during this episode, since I was busy reading 52 volume 2 in the ad breaks and during any scenes I disapproved of. I'm finding 52 a bit of an uphill struggle, since I don't really know the backstory or what's going on or who about 90% of the characters are, but every now and then Renee Montoya gets a few pages, so I persevere. Anyway. Back to Downton Abbey.)

( spoilers! )

- Vid rec: Alive by fly_to_dawn: awesome celebration of Primeval's Emily Merchant: time traveller, dinosaur fighter, all round amazing person. :D

- Speaking of vids, I am sort of after your help with my fictional female scientists one again, o lovely flist! As I mentioned last time, I was thinking about including Buffy disguising herself as a scientist, mostly because I love Buffy tremendously. And then I thought, well, Rose disguises herself as a scientist too: maybe if I can think of one or two more, it could be A Thing and not just Me Cheating. :D? The problem of course is that I can't think of any more. (I could've sworn that Sydney Bristow sneaked into somewhere dressed as a scientist, but I found this gallery of her aliases and it doesn't look like it.) Does anyone have any suggestions?

- Lately I have been reading a lot of comics! The medium still hasn't quite clicked for me, but I have been enjoying them all the same. Here is some incoherent squeeing some of the things I have been reading:

• Secret Six (up to "Depths"). ( spoilers )


• Birds of Prey (up to "Club Kids"). ( spoilers )


• Batgirl ("Kicking Assassins" and "Silent Running"). ( spoilers, also for later in the run )


• Wonder Woman: "The Circle". ( spoilers )

Now I need to make some Wonder Woman icons before I take "The Circle" back to the library. And also decide whether I'm going to ILL the next Batgirl, Secret Six and Wonder Woman books, since my library doesn't have them, or buy them and then resell them on Amazon. Decisions, decisions.

1.) Finished Shades of Grey last night! I was bowling along very happily with it, and then suddenly I got to the end and THINGS HAPPENED and I went agrjiegsnnghdfj!!! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Now I am reading Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction, which is interesting, but has decided to separate its paragraphs with extra line breaks rather than indentations, which is making it feel rather disjointed.

2.) Well, this is horrifying: "Jobcentres 'tricking' people out of benefits to cut costs, says whistleblower". (NB I haven't watched the video at the top of the post, since I read this article in the print version on Saturday.)

3.) Lovefilm tells me there is going to be a short wait for more Voyager and has sent me some other things in the meantime, viz.:

3a.) Going Postal! I was not a fan of Hogfather, but I thoroughly enjoyed this. ( spoilers )

3b.) A:tLA, season three, disc three, aka "The Day of Black Sun part 2" - "The Boiling Rock", aka MAI IS AWESOME, aka OH ZUKO. ( spoilers )

4.) Will crossposting this to LJ actually work? Who can say.

- Wait, that was the last Primeval this season? It didn't really feel like a finale, though I don't know if that was because I didn't realise it was, or because they knew they had another season when they made it. Here are my thoughts on it: ( spoilers )

- I haven't flailed about Legend of the Seeker for a while, clearly that is something I need to rectify. I am up to 2x16 ("Desecrated"), which I LOVED. ( spoilers )

- Ooo, and while I remember, anyone who has the region 1 DVDs of the third season of Avatar: the Last Airbender: are the extras worth an extra £10? Lovefilm doesn't have that season, so I'm going to buy it instead, but the region 2 set doesn't have any extras.

- In non-tv stuff, I am reading The Nine Tailors and finding it PROFOUNDLY TERRIFYING for reasons I cannot adequately explain. D:

- It is fandom_stocking time again! Mine is here; let me know where yours are if you're doing it too. ♥

- Why did I spend so long thinking I don't like Miranda? It is hilarious.

- Have been chopping and changing my livejournal layout for weeks, but I think I have finally found one I like, from mintyapple. Though having said that I will probably wake up tomorrow and decide that I'm fed up of it. It was surprisingly hard to find one I liked, given that I only had three criteria: 1) prettiness, 2) ability to add my header to it and 3) reasonable sized dark text on white background.

- I watched "Kinda" last night, which was excellent. Kudos to whoever thought of dyeing Tegan's teeth when she was possessed, that was VERY effective. I also watched "Four to Doomsday", which I wanted to like because the title is great, but I didn't quite. I spent a fair bit of time going "THIS IS WHY PEOPLE DON'T LIKE YOU" at Adric, alas. The sets were really good, though. Next up is a lot of stories that I have already seen! Exciting. (Oh, also, I have notes at home for a "Logopolis" and "Castrovalva" reaction post, must get round to typing those up. I expect they are full of wit and insight, unless they're not, which is also a possibility.)

20 Alesha (Law and Order: UK) icons for fandom20in20. Just before the last minute rather than just after the last minute only because the deadline's been extended...

(Thanks to persiflage_1 for the season 3 caps!)

Teasers:

( all twenty )