Safely back home!

... wow. I forgot how humid it was here. It's not that hot (yet), but everything is oh so sticky and clammy to the touch. Also, I think I've only been out of the plane for an hour or two, and I may already have my first mosquito bite.

On the other hand, my dad has an Asus EEE PC! The world taunts me with tiny laptops! Maybe I will look at the older models here and see if they're cheaper, since Asus is a Taiwan company. Before leaving, I didn't do anything save logistical stuff (packing, cleaning out fridge, etc.) and mainline Avatar and some Princess Tutu. Then I watched eps. 1-13 of Avatar S3 on the plane! I love my iPod so much. Its battery held up through all of that, and possibly could have gone for a few more episodes as well. ( Spoilers through 3x15 )

Sadly, I do not have an Avatar icon, so have one of another kickass woman!

New Avatar, WHOO! Sadly, I forgot to blog eps. 12-13, so I am shoehorning them in here.

( Spoilers kick your ass! )

Did everyone who is not me know that M. Night Shyamalan is directing an Avatar live-action movie (or possibly one per season)? And if so, where are the news bits? Have they finished casting?

(In other news, yay! I have the Avatar S2 DVDs and am happily watching the extras.)

This year was a strange TV year for me. I feel like I mostly stopped being enthusiastic about American dramas; a large part of this was because of my falling out with Heroes. While I did start watching a few new shows this year, I'm not head-over-heels in love with any of them yet, at least not in the same way I have been obsessing about kdramas.

2007 will probably also go down as the year I got sucked into Asian dramas. I managed to resist for about eight years, too, and then that little thing called Coffee Prince came along...

No spoilers in any of the below; please use <span style="color:#333,background:#333">spoiler text</span> for any spoilers in the comments.

Shows that didn't work for me

( The Collector )

( Ugly Betty )

( Dr. Who )

The only reason Heroes isn't on this list is because 2007 included some of the great S1 episodes.

Shows that I'm watching but not excited about

( Scrubs )

( Dead Like Me )

( Heroes )

( Life )

( Blood Ties )

( Fantasy Couple )

( Snow Queen )

Shows that I'm very excited about!

( Homicide: Life on the Street )

( Spooks/MI-5 )

( Pushing Daisies )

( Avatar: the Last Airbender )

( So You Think You Can Dance )

( Nobuta wo Produce )

( My Name Is Kim Sam Soon )

And now, my very favorite shows of the year! It's cheating a little, because I'm not done with either yet, but I am so filled with squee!

( Damo )

( Coffee Prince )

Huh, looking at all this, I did watch a lot this year. It just didn't feel like it, because for most of the year, I was hopping from show to show to show. I didn't fall into kdramas until Thanksgiving, but wow, I fell hard.

( Spoilers )

( Spoilers for all seven eps! )

I didn't end up watching much live-action TV this year; I spent a lot more time watching anime and reading manga. I didn't start the year off with that many live-action shows, and since I'm a lazy person, I usually never watch a show during its first season. I let other people rec stuff. This year, I started off with Scrubs, Veronica Mars, and Good Eats.

No spoilers for any of the shows. The "shows I'm excited about" part will have pimping information (aka, how to access the show, the general plotline, and etc.), as I am trying to get more people to watch.

Shows that didn't work for me

( Veronica Mars )

( Supernatural )

( The Office )

Shows that I'm watching but not excited about

( Scrubs )

( Good Eats )

( Battlestar Galactica )

( Avatar: the Last Airbender )

Shows that I'm very excited about!

( So You Think You Can Dance )

( Heroes )

And I've saved the best for last. My absolute favorite TV show of the year, hands down, is:

( Spooks/MI-5 )

( Spoilers for all two seasons )

Links
My non-spoilery write up
rilina's tags, memories and fic recs
octopedingenue's tags and memories

I don't remember who else is watching this, so if you are and are writing it up, let me know!

I'm not sure if I'm up to rilina's level of episode mainlining yet, but I feel watching 40 half-hour episodes in about four days is pretty up there.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is a cartoon running on Nickelodeon about a world in which there are four types of "bending" (think elemental magic): fire, water, air and earth. As the little intro spiel to each episode says, the Fire nation, Earth kingdom, Air nomads and Water tribes all lived in peace until the Fire nation decided to conquer everything about a hundred years ago. Normally, there would be someone called an avatar who could practice all four types of bending to keep the peace. The avatar is reincarnated into each tribe cyclically, but when the Fire nation invaded, the avatar never appeared. A hundred years later, Water tribe teenager Katara and her brother Sokka find the twelve-year-old avatar Aang and his flying bison in an iceberg.

Now they're on a mission to get Aang trained in all four types of bending while also trying to avoid being captured by the Fire nation and trying to prevent the Fire nation from taking over the world.

Whew! End plot exposition!

The series is very heavily influenced by anime in terms of character design and plot arcs, but I didn't actually feel that it was that much like anime. Of course, this is probably because the last time I watched American cartoons was.... eh.... Powerpuff Girls. From assorted comments that I've seen, it seems as though most American cartoons don't even have plot arc.

I watched season one (each season is 20 eps.) and was thoroughly unimpressed. I didn't like the voice actors, the individual episodes were too easily wrapped up with digestible moral lessons, the plot itself seemed rather obvious, and everything felt too easy. I think I was expecting something more like FMA, which is a pretty difficult standard to live up to!

Season two is much improved; there are now about an equal number of male and female characters, the plot arcs have gotten less predictable and more complex, and the characters themselves feel more real and less shoehorned into whatever the moral lesson of the week needs them to be. I'm still not completely fannish, but it is now on my season pass list.

Outside of plot and character, the thing that impresses me most about Avatar is the worldbuilding. It isn't as original and complex as Sherwood Smith's Inda or other such Giant Fantasy Tomes, but it's actually very well-done in terms of cultural appropriation. The entire world is based on Asia and other Asiatic-Pacific cultures; the Water tribes seem to be based on Inuit culture and the Air nomads feel Tibetan, but the Earth kingdom and Fire nation cultures are largely drawn from east Asia.

( More on cultural appropriation, Asian-ness and other such stuff )

Haven't been blogging lately (and by "lately," I mean "in the past two days"), largely because I am still mainlining Avatar and knitting like mad. Actually, the latter is inspiring the former, rather than the other way around. I've sort of been watching Avatar out of the corner of my eye while I attempt to work out assorted knitting problems; I wasn't very impressed with the first season at all.

Either the writing has gotten better, or I've gotten more used to the voice actors (non-Japanese voice actors sound SO WEIRD now!), because I'm actually paying attention to the second season. It also helps that more cool female characters have been introduced.

Knitting-wise, I have finished two pairs of fingerless gloves and am nearly done with a third. I think I've memorized the entire pattern now, which is a little scary. I actually knit some Christmas presents, which I swore not to do, largely because the fingerless gloves take about a day to complete (that is... if I knit through ten episodes of Avatar...). And now, I'm starting yet another scarf!

I spent ages and ages looking for a nice, reversible scarf pattern that would look good with self-striping yarn, which ruled out pretty much all cables. And I didn't want ot do seed stitch, because it bores me. After driving myself insane, I ended up going to the local yarn store to look for a stitch dictionary, only to find they were sold out on everything that wasn't Vogue Knitting's stitch dictionaries of cables or colorwork, neither of which I wanted. Borders also only had two, neither that I wanted for my personal library. So I am now just sucking it up and doing mistake rib, which will mean I will have enough brainpower to actually pay attention to whatever I'm watching at the moment.

And... the rats continue to be cute, albeit naughty! For a period, since they can easily jump off the couch, I was sticking them in the bathtub when I cleaned their cage.

Unfortunately, but really not that unsurprisingly, Ruki has already discovered that he can jump out of the bathtub, despite it being about ten times as tall as him. I stand there and glare at him, while he happily chitters to himself and tries time after time after time, no matter how often I dump him back into the tub.

I think he thinks it's a game.

( Giant pictures of rats )