Ceindreadh

Episode 2 airs on Monday the 30th, the rest of them will be on Sunday.

I love this crazy little show. I had to pause while watching the scene where David was trying to pray and we got the subtitles of his inner monologue! And all the little facial expressions that I might have missed if I'd been listening to dialogue. Like when David and Ben noticed Kirsten in the whiskey barrels. How can a show about good and evil and demons be so funny!

"my advice would be to look where you're going when you montage" definitely words to live by! I found it highly amusing when they used Crockett's Theme from the Miami Vice series as the 'heroic music' for the montage of Vimes in the sand and the way it all fell apart when he fell down the dunes.

Max "How did we run out of blood" Sharpe "I've narrowed it down to vampires or a global pandemic" Heh heh!

I love the way the show can go from the hilarious - August and Phil banishing the 'chain dragger' while Luke is assuring the client that everything is perfect - to the poignant - Phil talking to the picture of Jesus - to the downright heartbreaking - Luke telling the ghost to go to the light - all in the space of a single episode. It is a bit of a mood whiplash sometimes, but I'm enjoying it nonetheless.

This wasn't as bad as I'd thought it might be. I'm not thinking of it as an adaption of any books, but more like I would a remake of a show I'd previously enjoyed, in which they take the character names and basic settings and then just do what they like with them. I'll probably stick it out, at least for this series. Still pissed that they killed off Detritus. I know that trolls aren't invulnerable to projectile weapons, but they should have needed a hell of a lot more arrows to kill him.

Do you mean the school exhibition? It was a public demonstration of the children's education. Making a mistake while standing up in front of the whole town, I can totally understand why they'd be worried about it and not wanting to make mistakes.

The fanfic writers theme song is "you always hurt the one you love". (Guilty as charged!)

I went to see Titanic expecting to be bored to tears until the iceberg showed up, but was actually pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the pre-disaster bits. (still wouldn't bother re-watching it, but I didn't feel I'd wasted my money on the tickets)

First time for Ireland to get two gold medals in different events (rowing and boxing)

IIRC, there was an inquiry on the beam during the Women's All Around. Nobody could move to the next rotation until it had been finished. Usually it's to make sure that a particular move or connection was scored correctly and you can't have an inquiry for the E score, just the D score. I think there was even an incident at the World Championships a few years back where the coaches requested an inquiry into a beam score and ended up with the D score being lowered rather than raised.

And if you want to see how hard it is, watch the riding section of the Modern Pentathlon where they're riding unfamiliar horses and have to hope that they don't pick one who turns out to be a stubborn bastard. (yes, I'm pissed that Irish athlete Natalya Coyle dropped from 4th to 19th because her horse wouldn't co-operate)

The big change in scoring since Rio is that instead of having 5 x code requirements on Bars, Beam, Floor - each worth .5 for a total 2.5 addition to the D score - there’s now only 4 x code requirements - 2 point addition to the D score. A lot of skills were downgraded as well, including nearly all vaults, but that was mostly to make sure that vault scores weren’t going to be way higher than the other apparatuses.

How long before the events does she have to make a decision? I know they have reserves listed - who I presume would be training the last few days as if they were definitely going to be competing. But how much advance warning are they likely to get if they're going to be moved up a spot?

I did Judo for a few years in University and when you get two fairly evenly matched competitors, it's difficult to get an advantage and can feel a bit scrappy until the fighters settle in a bit.

I think though that at the time that Strug was making her second attempt, they didn't know that it wasn't necessary. IIRC, there was still one Russian competitor to go on the floor. Roza Galiyeva did her routine after Strug's second vault and the noise from the crowd was so deafening that she couldn't hear her music - which may or may not have contributed to a lower score that meant the USA team would have won without the second vault.

I think that it’s the same as with the All Around. If a gymnast withdraws - or is withdrawn by their team - another gymnast from the same country can take their spot. If a gymnast without a team withdraws then it goes to the reserve spot. AFAIK, ever since Atlanta 1996, coaches have had the option to swap out gymnasts after qualifying and it doesn’t have to be because of injury. Usually it’s done strategically, to get in the gymnast most likely to medal.

She got FOUR Olympic golds, FOUR (which is of course still an achievement in itself). Team, All Around, Vault, Floor. She didn't qualify for Uneven Bars in Rio and she got Bronze on the beam. Random thought, with all the commentary about how this was the first Russian team gold since the Unified Soviet team took gold 29 years ago in Barcelona. How cool is it that a member of that gold medal winning team was still competing in this Olympics as well. (the wonderful Oksana Chusovitina)

I know that they changed the rules after Barcelona so that a gymnast who’d made the finals could be substituted regardless of whether they were injured or not. That way the coaches could put in the best prospect, even if they weren’t the 2nd (or at the time 3rd) highest placed. I’m not sure if it still applies though.

That was super cool!

And then of course all you have to do is make sure that the background looks like the background of your home/office, but in reality you could be sitting in a car outside your murder victims house. Then you just excuse yourself for five minutes to do the job and the cops won't suspect you because you surely couldn't have made it to the victims house and back in the time you were off-camera. (You'd probably need to spoof your IP address so it would look like you were where you were pretending to be...and I have spent way too much time thinking about this...)

That's the story of my writing life! Even when I was in an active fandom, I always tended to gravitate towards the uncommon pairings and the less popular characters to write about. On the other hand, I would occasionally deliberately write about characters that didn't seem to be getting much love in fanfic, so I suppose I can't complain too much.

It's been a long time since I shopped anywhere that bagged my groceries for me, but I do tend to arrange them on the conveyor belt in the order in which I want to bag them myself - chilled, frozen, papery items etc. Occasionally there'll be kids doing the bagging, trying to raise money for their school or club and usually I'll just tell them that I'll give them a donation anyway, but to keep their hands off my bags.

Meh, I can handwave that with the assumption that things could have deteriorated since his last checkup. And if he'd been having regular checkups without anything coming up, then maybe he just assumed that everything was always going to be okay. What bugged me about the storyline was that while they were given the options of either a risky surgery with a 20% mortality rate today and no more surgery required or a safe surgery today and the risky surgery in 5 years time. Nobody thought to ask whether waiting 5 years to do the risky surgery would increase or decrease the possible mortality rate. I would have thought that knowing whether you'd have a better or worse chance of survival in 5 years would be an important factor in the decision making process.

I do miss the heady days of my earlier forays in fanfiction. When I was writing about ER and NCIS and Torchwood and the shows were still running and every story would get a ton of hits. I lived for the comments and reviews. The actual numbers, I don't think I was really too concerned about them at the time. (possibly because I started out on the newsgroups where there wasn't any way to track readers) But even then, I'd post something that I'd put my heart into and had worked on for ages and it might get a small reaction, maybe a few reviews. And then I'd post something that I'd tossed off in an evening and I'd get masses of reaction to it. There's no accounting for the whims of fanfic readers. In some cases, it could easily be that the writers of the other stories have accumulated fans and followers simply because they've been doing it longer. But I completely understand what it's like to give your all to your writing and not get anything back. It still gives me a little thrill every time I check my email and see a notification for a new review or like or Kudo. I just wish I was better at writing reviews, because even when I absolutely love a story, I can't always articulate just why.