Innerbrat

Clearing Out – Vertigo and Indies

2013-05-23T13:17:30Z

Demon Knights and Supergirl are my biggest piles yet to be claimed. The former in particular surprises me. Paul Cornell! Vandal Savage! Questing for the right for princesses to marry each other!

So the first on this list is technically DC, but it’s not DCU and that’s how I roll:

~~Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre:~~ Written by Darwyn Cooke, drawn by the amazing Amanda Conner. An origin story for Laurie Jupiter, about growing up with an ex-superhero for a Mom and breaking out on your own. Obviously relevant to me, as a Black Canary fan. [Deuce]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the end of Season 8, the beginning of Season 9. Also Angel and Faith, which is a season 9 spin off.

Cinderella: Fables are Forever A Fables-universe spy story starring Cinderella and… well, that would be a spoiler.

The Guild – One shot ‘origins’ for the characters of Felicia Day’s web series.

House of Mystery – the last few arcs of Matt Sturges’ fantasy romp. Lots of fun, and definitely a title I miss.

Stumptown: The Case of the Baby in the Velvet Case – The second arc of Greg Rucka’s PI series, so-starring Mim Bracca from Fistful of Rain. Actually, what the hell, I’ll throw in Fistful of Rain in paperback if you want. This is an amazing four-issue story, and contains the best car chase sequence in comics that I’ve ever seen.

Saucer Country: Paul Cornell’s 14 issue story about an alien abductee (also an hispanic woman) running for president. Conspiracies! Aliens! Politics! This is also great.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Clearing Out – Marvel Edition

2013-05-22T14:23:35Z

Addemdum to yesterday’s post: I forgot some:

Green Arrow grab bag – pre52 and nu52. [Rob]

Demon Knights – entire nu52 run. if Batwoman is one of the best nu52 titles, this one, created by Paul Cornell, is another one. A sword and sorcery team book, featuring Vandal Savage (as played by BRIAN BLESSED), Etrigan the Demon, Madam Xanadu, and a host of new characters, including the Horsewoman, Shining Knight (reinvented as a trans man) and Al Jabr. I highly recommend this series!

Marvel Time!

(If you were waiting for my Fraction/DeConnick stuff: sorry that’s going somewhere already.)

Daredevil – volume 3. Deceptively light tone from Waid, seems brash and comicy and then turns it on its head with SURPRISE silver age villains are actually REALLY CREEPY, on top of stress from Matt’s Real Life. Whether the character concept of Daredevil appeals to you or not, the book is constantly well written.

Daredevil End of Days – darker, AU story by Bendis set after Matt’s death, providing a gripping coda to Bendis’ great run on the title.

Punisher – Greg Rucka’s superb run, followed by Punisher: War Zone. An amazing story about a woman whose wedding was destroyed by a mass shooting, arming up and going after revenge. If you like angry women with vendettas, you will love Rachel Alves. Oh, and Frank Castle is in it too.

Fearless Defenders -Misty Knight, Valkyrie, Dani Moonstar and Hippolyta team up to fight mythological bad guys. Marvel’s answer to Birds of Prey is amazing, you guys! This has only just started, so it’s not a huge package. [All going to Kat]

Young Avengers – most (not all, sorry) of Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, along with the new Young Avengers title, which is a fun teen team book with a couple of awesome new characters (Miss America FTW)

Also two issues of Jan ven Meter’s Black Cat mini, but these are #3 and 4 of 4, so I understand if you’re not interested.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Clearing Out – DC edition

2013-05-21T16:57:33Z

So the biggest thing, weight-wise, that I find myself owning and unable to take anywhere, is a big pile of comics. Yay comics! Boo, comics are heavy.

I can, and will of course, dump a pile of them on Goodwill and Housing Works, but I suspect they will never find someone to love and read them, so I thought I’d let you guys have a look see which you would like to buy.

(I’d ask for shipping, and a donation towards the American Red Cross, the HI Fund at GOSH or another charity, should you not wish to donate to those two.)

My huge pile includes:

Batman, Detective Comics pre-52, Batman nu52, mostly written by Scott Snyder, covering the excellent Black Mirror storyline, the Court of Owls, and the mini-series Gates of Gotham. Some wonderful Dick-as-Batman in the pre-52 series.

Pre-52 Gotham including ~~3 issues of Steph-Batgirl, The Return of Bruce Wayne (Oracle, Jim Gordon, Batgirl)~~ (Fi) and Streets of Gotham

Batwoman, the entire nu52 run, which as far as I’m concerned is some of the best of the nu52 comics available. ALSO Chase 100 page special with background to one of the main characters of the current series. Includes Batwoman #0 signed by Amy Reeder. (Gen)

Supergirl – Kelly Sue DeConnick’s storyline, and the first arc of her nu52 run. I really liked this nu52 story, but dropped it when they took away the things that made her interesting.

Secret Six – the final few arcs on one of the best things Gail Simone has written. [Jen]

Birds of Prey – all pre-52. Not as many as I thought I had, but also by Gail Simone and all very excellent (Gen)

Stormwatch – nu52. Paul Cornell had a good run of this, and I got bored eventually after he left. Read it for Midnighter and Apollo, because they are excellent.

Knight and Squire – GUYS THIS IS EXCELLENT. Paul Cornell’s mini series about the British representatives of Batman inc. (Fi)

Wonder Woman – Pre52 and nu52. Cliff Chiangs art on the nu52 stuff is great.(Kat)

Worlds’ Finest - the entire Huntress mini starring Helena Wayne, and the first arcs of the Power Girl/Huntress Worlds’ Finest title. (Kat)

~~nu52 grab bag – books I started for a few issues, including Static Shock, Firestorm, a story line about Vandal Savage’s daughter, and Blue Beetle~~ [Jen]

Coming up: Marvel and independents. Ask me for details!

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Alright, let’s make this official

2013-05-20T15:25:01Z

I’m going home.

This is not what I wanted, and it’s stressing me the fuck out.

But it’s okay in many ways. I miss Abby. And Charlie. I miss Izzy, and Sam and Lauren. And I hate uncertainty.

New York was the very best thing I could have done for myself. The reasons didn’t pan out, but I am a healthier, happier, more knowledgable person than I was three years ago. And New York, Bank Street, Gotham Girls, Ana and Becca made that happen.

The job I’m leaving is the very best job I could ever have had – the job and my boss and everything about it seemed so perfectly designed for me and my expertise and my personality that me not getting to do it for longer feels like concrete disproof of the existence of narrativium in our lives.

I don’t want to go.

But I can do it.

Now, who wants to buy my comics?

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

It’s been a very long time

2013-05-15T14:32:39Z

I got some disappointing news this morning. I will talk about it, but I’m not ready for that yet.

But maybe you could leave me writing prompts or distractions in the comments?

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

I really need to get back to using this space

2013-04-23T02:48:58Z

Name a character in any of my fandoms, and I'll answer these questions:

1. Do you love/hate/don’t feel strongly about this character?
2. What’s your favorite trait of this character?
3. What’s your favorite moment/event involving this character?
4. If you could have one power/attribute/etc. of this character, what would it be?
5. Have you ever pictured this character naked?
6. When did you fall in love/hate with this character? I you don’t have any strong feelings toward them, why not?
7. Who’s your OTP for this character?

Y'all know my fandoms, right?

[DC comics, Marvel comics, Arrow, Discworld, Leonardo, Claymore, Korra, A:TLA, Capital Scandal, Buffy/Fray, Sungkyankwan Scandal, Queen and Country, Parks and Rec, Go On, The Scarlet Pimpernel and others I forget right now!]

This post is also posted at InnerBrat @ Dreamwidth where it has comments. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Storytime: W/E 17/02/2013

2013-02-18T02:23:55Z

Books
Currently Reading A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel

Comics
Green Arrow 17
Avengers Assemble 12
Demon Knights 17
Saucer Country 12

Movies
Singin' In The Rain

T.V.
Justice League Unlimited: "This Little Piggy" | "The Greatest Story Never Told" | "Ultimatum" | "Dark Heart" | Wake The Dead" | "The Once and Future Thing: Weird Western" | "The Once and Future Thing: Time, Warped"
Elementary 1.16 "Details"
Young Justice: Invasion 16 "Complicated"
Black Lagoon 1
Arrow 1.14 The Odyssey
Gaksital 27,28
Community 4.02 "Paranormal Parentage"
Parks and Recreation 5.13 "Emergency Response"

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries 1-23, 87 "An Understanding" | 88 "Okay
Pemberley Digital Domino 5 "If Else" | 6 "Return"

Would have put this up earlier, but I accidentally slept!
These were all great. Your thoughts?

This post is also posted at InnerBrat @ Dreamwidth where it has comments. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Debi Watches Arrow (sydht!) 1.14: The Odyssey

2013-02-15T22:11:12Z

This was a pretty simple episode that consisted nearly entirely of Island Flashback, which is good because it’s about time the filled us in on some island stuff, while a couple of significant changes to the status quo happen in Now Time.

Now Time

So remember when we left Ollie, he was Hoodguying right into Moira’s office and pointing an arrow at her face?

Well, we pick up where we left off, with him yelling at her to tell him about Walter and WHERE IS HE? And WHAT IS THE UNDERTAKING? And – I wonder if anyone has ever called it “the undertaking” before Moira hit on that euphemism while talking to John Barrowmerlyn, and if not, will she realize that he’s directly quoting her? Probably not.

Anyhoo, Moira is scared shitless and immediately starts begging for her life. She even grabs a framed photograph of Ollie and Thea from the shelf behind her. I like to think that she hasn’t moved all these photos in in the last six weeks, and in fact they are Walter’s, because he loves his stepkids. There are no photos of Walter on that shelf that I can see, but there are photos of Moira.

She holds up the photo and gets down on her knees, begging Hoodguy to spare her life for the sake of her kids – Oliver and Thea. Hoodguy is a bleeding heart who is actually kind of fond of Oliver and Thea Queen, so he lowers the bow… and Moira, from whom I would expect nothing less, brings up a pistol and starts shooting. She gets Hoodguy in the shoulder and he falls to the floor, while she grabs a phone and calls security.

Ollie makes a run for it, leaving just a bloodstain on the floor. And where does he go? To the parking lot, where he hides out in Felicity’s car. He’s in the back seat when Felicity strolls over and lets herself in, and it’s not actually all that obvious how long he’s been there. I hope it’s just a few seconds, but that’s one hell of a coincidence. On seeing that he’s’ Hoodguy, Felicity’s reaction is “everything about you just became so unbelievably clear.”

Iiiiii’m not sure why it had to be necessary to portray Felicity as too stupid to make this connection before seeing him in costume. SUPERHERO MAGIC. She’s about to drive him to a hospital but he insists on the old factory in the Glades, makes her promise, and then passes out. So what else can she do? TO THE ARROWCAVE.

Diggle’s reaction to having a person rush into the Arrowcave and interrupting his quality news-watching time, is to draw a gun on the intruder, and who can blame him? When she begs for his help moving the really heavy unconscious Ollie, he snaps out of it and they wheel him in.

It turns out the Arrowcave is fully equipped for emergency triage – I thank Diggle’s preparedness for this. They’ve converted a filing cabinet into an icebox on wheels, and it’s already stocked with Ollie’s own blood (O negative. Because Ollie is SPECIAL) and a defibrillator.

Felicity is squeamish about the whole blood, emergency blood transfusion thing, and Diggle talks her down with a reassuring, steady voice, and I try not to ship them, I really do, but I’ll be honest, I’d ship Diggle with a cardboard box.

Together they stem the bleeding and stitch him back up, and Diggle remarks how relatively calm Felicity is being, despite her usual Felicity-like twitchiness. Did she know all along? Well, she says, laptops with bullet holes, black arrows, energy drink hangover cures? Please.

So Diggle and Oliver have been doing some good things. Diggle points out that she, Felicity, has been helping. Because even Ollie Queen needs help sometimes.

Diggle and Felicity bonding is interrupted when Ollie has what Diggle calls a seizure that leads to cardiac arrest. Felicity wants to call 911, because she sensible, but no! This is what the Arrow Defibrillator is for! It is for… not working first time, apparently, but Felicity uses WIRING MAGIC that she learned from building computers, and fixes it. I love it when difibs work in fiction, as uncommon an event as that might be in real life (I actually don’t know.)

While waiting for Ollie to wake up, Felicity picks up the bow and mentions all the people it’s killed.

Bad people, says Diggle.

Yeah, and people who happen to work for bad people. You’ve had the luxury of only working Security for people like Ollie, Diggs. What about your professional colleagues? Blah blah this show really wants us to believe that unnamed people deserve to die wtf.

Diggle returns with an anecdote about Afghanistan, being tasked with protecting a warlord who was a drug dealing, human trafficking piece of garbage, and of the unit being attacked by insurgents. In the gunfight, Diggle killed an 18 year old. It gave him a deep sense of moral guilt, and he didn’t know if he was a good man then, but with Oliver, he does feel Good.

Having just mentioned the security guards Ollie kills, I wonder if the line between them and Afghanistan!Diggle is deliberate? I would feel more comfortable if it was.

“There are always casualities when you’re fighting a war,” says Diggs.

Remember when I thought Ollie’s journey was going to be becoming someone other than a reckless murderer of bad people and becoming the kind of hero who can fight with a bow and not kill people?

While Ollie is out, he has one long flashback to:

Island of Low Saturation

Slade is training Ollie. in hand to hand, and knife combat and escrima sticks, and he’s kind of surprised Ollie has managed to stay alive for the six months he’s been on the island so far.

Ollie’s heart isn’t really into learning escrima, on account of how he’ll be fighting men with guns when they take the airfield. So Slade gives him a gun and demonstrates how it’s possible to take a gun off an armed man – if the armed man is Oliver Queen and the unarmed man is Slade Wilson.

Back in Slade’s plane they compare maps and discuss the lay of the land. Ollie suggests that they could maybe break Yao Fei out of Fyer’s camp, but Slade would rather focus on the airstrip – he knows from surveillance that there are usually at least ten men guarding the perimeter and a man in the PATC tower, behind bulletproof glass. This guy needs to be taken out before he notices anything is wrong and can radio for help. Slade needs Ollie to do that.

(And everyone who’s played Arkham Asylum instantly knows that Slade Wilson is not as good at this as Batman).

The supply planes are once every three months, and if they don’t catch this one, says Slade, they’re going to die soon.

Ollie picks out his photo of Laurel – which I guess he’s carefully transferred with every change of clothes and it survived all the trips into the water he’s taken, and I’d also prefer if he had a photo of Thea instead – and drifts off into a dream where he is lying on a bed next to Laurel. He asks Laurel not to hate him for cheating on her – I guess he doesn’t feel guilty for Sara’s actual death – and Laurel asks him if it hurt when they killed him. Dream!Ollie has a hole in his forehead (Bullethole? Arrow hole? Eh.)

Anyway, he’s woken by Slade and they move out – but not before Slade shares a meaningful look with his Deathstroke mask. They are walking through the forest, all sneaky like, when Ollie fails to look where he’s stepping and we hear a click – Good ol’ Queen went and stepped on a landmine.

(“Sir? What should we do if we step on a mine?” “Well, the usual procedure, George, is to jump sixty feet in the air and scatter yourself over a wide area.”)

Slade advises Ollie not to take his foot off the mine, just when some of Fyers’ soldiers appear over a hill. So Slade does what any self-centred hard hearted ex-ASIS guy would do in this situation: he grabs Ollie’s bag of weapons and hides, leaving Ollie standing on a landmine and only just enough time to put his balaclava on before the soldiers catch up with him.What are you doing out here, fellow balaclava soldier? Come with us. Well, I would, but I’m standing on this landmine…

And then Slade comes roaring out of the undergrowth and kills all the soldiers while Ollie can only manage a single-knee roller derby fall, keeping his foot on the mine. Conveniently, all these dead bodies help Slade pull an Indiana Jones trick where Ollie is a golden idol and a dead soldier is a bag of sand. I’d think it had about as much chance of succeeding, but it turns out Slade and Ollie are very lucky indeed today.

At the camp, Eddie is reading The Odyssey, because this is not one of those episodes that’s choosing to be subtle with its title and theme. Yao Fei is invited into his tent and informed that he will be training some of Fyers’ men in using bows, because bows are better than guns and everyone knows it. The point of the scene is mostly so Fyers can make a veiled threat towards a ‘her,’ whom he is using to blackmail Yao Fei into being on his side.

As night falls in the forest, Slade and Ollie are camping out, and Ollie is trying ot make a fire by rubbing two sticks together. It is amusing the Hell out of Slade, who lets Ollie get really worked up about his lack of help – before whipping out a Zippo. And suddenly I love this guy.

With the fire lit, out comes the photo of Laurel and Slade and Ollie get to chatting about girls, and the sleeping with those girls’ sisters. Ollie says he needs to get home to “make it right.” Slade’s reaction is a wordier “hahahahaha you idiot.” Anyway, Slade then chooses to relate that he is jaded and cynical about everyone since his partner joined Fyers when he shot them down.

His partner was a man called Billy Wintergreen, and remember how Slade explained that Ollie was not tortured by him, Slade, but by his partner? Well, Ollie wasn’t listening, because now he’s really mad to find out that he was Slade’s partner.

Note for Non-Comics Readers: William Wintergreen was a companion and butler to Deathstroke, the terminator. An Alfred to Slade’s evil Batman. IDEK. Comics.

Anyway, Billy, who was the godfather to Slade’s son, Joe, abandoned their mission to rescue Yao Fei, and turned his back on his partner, leaving Slade angry and jaded. “Everybody is in this life for themselves.”

NNCR: Slade Wilson has three children, and his son Joseph is also known as Jericho, and a member of the Teen Titans. Kidnapped as a child to be used against Slade, Joseph had his throat cut, which left him unable to talk, and later he learned to Sign. Slade is the worst dad in comics.

Later that night Slade and Ollie arrive at the airstrip, and Ollie is sent to clear out That One Guy while Slade deals with the other ten. He does that with a sniper rifle and silencer until he runs out of ammo, and then running up behind people with a sword, taking them down before they know he’s there. Meanwhile Ollie sneak-sneak-sneaks to the tower.

It’s basically exactly like playing Arkham Asylum.

Ollie reaches the tower, bursts in wielding his knife, and has his ass kindly handed to him by the solider with a gun. It’s faintly embarrassing, really. Fortunately, Slade turns up in order to stab him from behind and save Ollie. Handing Ollie the man’s gun (“And try not to shoot yourself by mistake.”) Slade goes for a check over the airstrip and leaves Ollie in charge of the PATC tower. So what is the first thing Ollie does, left in control of all this actual technology.

He calls Laurel, of course!

(I would call my mother. But island!Ollie is in luuuuuuuurve.)

Laurel answers, but Ollie is too overcome with feels to say anything, even “I’m okay, tell Mom and Thea” or “I’m sorry” before Slade returns and cuts the connection with an “are you crazy” and a “they might be monitoring calls.”

Just at that moment, though, the supply plane makes contact! ETA in 3 hours, please acknowledge?

Slade does, but the plane comes back with a pass phrase: “Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth.”

(“Hooray hooray for the spinster’s sister’s daughter!”)

Oh no! what to do?

Fortunately, Ollie only read one book in college, and it was The Odyssey. He knows the response! It is “nothing is born that is weaker than man!” No wait! Wait, it is “Nothing is bred that is weaker than man!” That was close, he almost misquoted.

I went online and looked up some Odyssey quotes, and I guess Ollie is lucky that his translation and Fyers’ translation are the same one, and not, say, the one that goes “ Of all creatures that breathe and walk on the earth there is nothing more helpless than a man is.” That’s the problem with emphasizing the need to be word perfect with a translation.

And now for Slade’s masterplan: to radio in an airstrike on the island, killing Fyers and everyone else! Because Slade is really angry, okay?

But what about Yao Fei, asks Ollie? Fuck him, that’s what, says Slade. Fyers has plans for Lian Yu, that involve Yao Fei, and Slade’s job is now to stop those plans. But Yao Fei saved Ollie’s life, and you know what, says Ollie? It’s time to stop being a selfish playboy and start honoring the people he owes his life to. He’s off to get Yao Fei.

He has three hours, says Slade.

If I don’t make it, Ollie returns, please call my family?

Off he goes to the camp, and sneaks into Yao Fei’s camp, full of the good news of the escape. But No! says Yao Fei. What? says Ollie? No, who, says Yao Fei, and punches Ollie onto the floor just as Fyers walks in.

After a quick scene at the airstrip to acknowledge that it’s landing time, Ollie is marched into a ring of mercenaries. Ollie is all ready to fight him again, but Fyers corrects him.

“No, Mr. Queen, I expect you to die.” - is not what he says but it may as well be. It’s time for Deathstroke Bill to kill him!

Deathstroke Bill steps into the ring and starts to beat Ollei up, while Ollie fights back with words, using Bill Wintergreen’s name and yelling that he used to work for the ASIS, and used to stand for something. I’m reminded of a scene in Gail Simone’s Birds of Prey in which Dinah learns the first blow is struck with words. Btu everything reminds me of Dinah all the time anyway.

Anyway, he beats Ollie up some more, and it looks bad for our hero, despite employing the only asset Oliver Queen has (“whatever he’s paying you, I’ll triple it!”) but then: EXPLOSION. Slade Wilson strolls into camp having thrown a buttload of grenades and distracted people with bangs. He and Deathstroke Bill get into a one on one hand to hand duel which is a delight to watch. It ends when Slade, who is spectacularly angry, of course, stabs Billy right through the eye.

NNCR: Deathstroke Slade only had one eye after his wife shot one out when she was enraged following the kidnapping and injuring of Joseph mentioned above.

Fyers appears at this point and shoots Slade in the arm, but Ollie grabs a gun and runs onto the scene, shooting at Fyers and pulling an injured Slade to safety. They are attacked by a mercenary on their way out but Ollie employs his new improved hand to hand awesomeness to disarm and pistol whip him unconscious. Just in time to see the plane leave above them.

Back in the crashed plane, Ollie pulls the bullet out of a now-bound Slade. Apparently tying him up was Slade’s idea because operating without anesthetic can cause people to punch out their doctors. OR Slade is secretly Wonder Woman and just likes being tied up. Probably the former. Anyway, Slade is impressed Ollie didn’t puke. Ollie says he just swallowed it. Mirror with Felicity and Diggle, somewhat.

Ollie laughs because he’s trapped on an island and his only friend is named Wilson. I don’t get it. But then I google “Cast Away Tom Hanks” and I wish I still didn’t get it.

The new plan? Hope that Slade’s explosions set Fyers back enough that maybe the people paying him call it off, and in the meantime try not to die. Ollie points out that Slade said they would die if they missed the plane. Slade changed his mind. The spoiled rich boy would have got them killed, but Ollie had a montage, remember? Now they stand a chance.

Back in the camp, Fyers is talking to his employer (who has an American accent) on the phone. He’ll ‘handle’ the Slade situation, but for now, he’s ensured Yao Fei’s cooperation. How, you ask? Well, we’re about to find out, because Fyers grants Yao Fei five minutes in a tent with…

…his daughter Shado! Whom he hugs and assures everything will be over soon, as the camera focuses in on Shado’s shoulder, which bears a tattoo of a dragon.

NNCR: Shado was an archer trained and raised by the Yakuza, who wore a dragon tattoo along her entire arm. She was introduced in The Longbow Hunters as a foil to Ollie, and appeared a couple of times through the Grell run. Not only is she unrelated to Yao Fei, she is also Japanese. I don’t know if they’ll deal with that in Arrow. I’ve read speculation she might have a Japanese mother? On one of Ollie’s many ‘finding himself’ trips, Shado raped him and conceived a child, Robert. I wouldn’t mind seeing this child show up in the show, but I hope to Weisinger that this time it will be consensual.

The Now Time.

Ollie wakes up to find that he hasn’t died again. As he and Diggle discuss cover stories for the new scar, Felicity hacks the police crime lab and orders the destruction of the blood sample from the crime scene. On the brand new Arrow computer she apparently had installed while waking for Ollie to wake up.

“Does that mean you’re in?” Asks Ollie.

No, says Felicity, mostly on account of all the killing he does. She updated the system because she didn’t like how badly it was set up, and also, she’s actually going to help them find Walter. Because Walter is awesome and no one had better forget it. Felicity is in it to find Walter (so ’til the end of the season?) and then she’s out.

Diggle wants to bring up Moira again, with the shooting of her son and the maybe being involved? No, says Ollie, because begging on behalf of her children proves she’s innocent – at least to one of those children.

The most important part of that scene, though, is the close up of Ollies’s shoulder. A dragon tattoo, just like Shado has!

NNCR: Shado’s dragon tattoo in comics represents her ties to the Yakuza, just as Arrow!Ollie’s chest tattoo marks him as a captain of the Bratva. I’m pretty much in love with the idea that Ollie’s collection of inks is just a seriousl of business cards showing his membership of a planet’s worth of criminal organizations.

Ollie gets back to Queen Manor in time to walk in on Moira giving a statement to Quentin. Where was he? At the club, where there’s no cell phone reception. Why? Because Moira was threatened by the vigilante.

Ollie is SHOCKED and APPALLED by this turn of events and hopes Moira is okay. When Quentin tells him there was a screw up at the lab and the blood sample was lost, Ollie absolutely fails to be appropriately angry and Quentin notices.

Quentin leaves, and Moira promptly hugs Ollie tight, right on the bullet wound.

(I remember getting my first tattoo when I lived at home and didn’t let my parents know. They did insist on hugging me right on the scar tissue, those oblivious bastards.)

Ollie gives Moira the very meaningful and sincere promise that the Hoodguy is never going to bother her again. And Moira believes him? the whole scene basically makes no sense unless you assume that both Moira and Quentin knows what Ollie is up to and are playing along with it.

CREDITS.

Basically a fine episode, with a nice linear plot, and a great showcase for Manu Bennett’s performance as Slade Wilson. The Island plot is really warming up. Although I have now realizes that the ‘six months’ implies that the island plot is taking place in ‘real time’ five years ago, and now I expect they’re going to take five seasons to fill in everything that happened to Ollie in those five years.

And when that happens, nothing ends up making any sense.

Needed more Laurel. Needed more Diggle. Needed a whole buttload more Shado.

SHADO.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Year End

2013-02-11T16:40:15Z

Things I have done this year:

- graduated from both a masters in education and a PhD in paleontology.
- been a lead classroom teacher for week-long summer camps, and at afterschool.
- taught classes on paleontology, structures, biodiversity, bioluminescence and butterflies.
- found myself jobs, albeit not full time permanent things.
- started dating again, quit dating again, and slowly started thinking about dating again.
- wrote long form fanfiction, and actually started work on the structure of a novel.
- more physical fitness than I’ve ever managed before. Been enthusiastic about a sport!

Things I hope to do next year:

- find a full time job in education.
- attend a historical ball.
- deal with my social anxiety enough to make a real go of the dating thing.
- make a start in actually writing that novel.
- moar skating!

I’m definitely definitely not where I ever intended to be on my 32nd birthday. On the other hand, I’m more or less stable, emotionally. I know who I am, and I know what I love and what I’m good at, and I think I like myself today. I have friends, online and off, I have jobs that I adore, and an amazing living situation with the best roommates I could ask for.

TODAY I am teaching, then going out for an English, then going iceskating. But right now I’m listening to Rock of Ages and dancing in my apartment, because I can.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Snowmanticism

2013-02-09T20:13:24Z

Today is a day of baking smells (cinnamon rolls for breakfast, fresh baked rosemary bread for lunch, cupcakes in a pile waiting for afterwards,) TV catching up, and cursing comic book artists for making outfits that are hard to copy.

It is also a day for looking out of the window at the eiderdown of snow that fell on the city overnight.

We walked through the snow, Ana and I, last night on returning from gaming night in Manhattan. It was early for a gaming night – midnight rather than two – because of the incoming storm that we didn’t want to be stranding by. And as he went into MacDonalds to get himself a snack, vegetarian little me stood outside, snug as an aphid in an afghan, in my Hunter wellingtons, winter coat, and big fluffy wolf hat. I buried my feet into the fluffy virgin blanket and looked up, squinting into the swirl of snowflakes that was making the night that special kind of grey you only get from snow and streetlights.

Up to 85% of all snowflakes have grown around a bacteria at their center, and as I watched them swirl around me, I reflected on what it meant to be surrounded by uncountable things that were once living. Of course, bacteria and other microbes float around unseen and unperceived all the time, but when they’re surrounded by delicate fluffy crystals, it’s hard to ignore it.

I’ve been thinking a bit about life recently, and my definition of it, and I don’t know when it happened, but I no longer think of ‘life’ as a discrete quantity. Not for me the concept of “a life,” separate from the others, and by extension, not ‘my life’ or ‘your life’ or ‘his life,” but a continuum, magical in my inability to sufficiently explain life to start with.

It’s easy to count the life withing this sack of skin as one, but even my body is a complex machine of symbiotics, not just the bacteria I play host to, but trillions of identical mitochondria, genetically distinct from he nucleus that dictates most of my proteins, but as vital to the functioning of this body as anything else.

I’ve been accidentally poking my head into that corner of the internet that deals with the politics surrounding the ‘beginning’ of life, and it doesn’t fit with me. Of course a human cell that divides is alive. Of course we can’t count each cell and call them distinct. Of course genetic distinction doesn’t make distinct lives any more than identical twins are one person. The life in this body isn’t a thing my parents created, it’s part of a thing that they shared with me. And while this body is temporary, and I may or may not share with the next generation in quite the same way, when I stand in the snow, enjoying the moment when trillions of living things are for once visible to my eye, I’m happy to share it with all of them.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Why do we dissect?

2013-02-08T20:55:17Z

Half way between where I sit and the advance guard of Winter Storm Nemo, sits a bucket that contains a lot of formalin and two large freshwater mussels. Also on that table is two bivalve pairs, cleaned out yesterday after we hacked up the mussels inside them.

It was a messy, disorganized process that hit a snag very early on when I handed the kids (aged on a continuous spectrum between 5 and 10) their mussels and told them to prise them open. In the 10 years since I last carried out a mussel vivisection during my undergraduate degree, muggins here forgot about the ridiculously strong adductor muscles that keep the shell firmly closed even in death. What resulted was five straight minutes of me hacking between the shells with a scalpel while fending off such “helpful” instructions as “SMASH IT WITH A HAMMER!”

(Meanwhile, one of our high school interns sliced the second open with no problems.)

At no point did it look like this. Image Credit: University of Wisconsin

Teaching with an age group as diverse as this one isn’t easy. Especially when there are scalpels involved: when the enthusiastic explorers are hacking flesh apart, I find my attention ripped away by younger children who, at the end of a long school day and nearing the end of an even longer school week, are losing their grip on their ‘indoor voice’ button. At the end of the class, one mussel was ripped asunder, and the other neglected and under appreciated.

It certainly wasn’t a textbook example of how a dissection class should go. And even though I’m still improving as a teacher, there are ways in which this class if never going to look like the focused, guided classes I remember from high school and college. And if it ever does, I’ll be doing my kids a disservice.

So why am I ripping animals apart with the help of children as young as five? What could they be getting out of it?

Well, I don’t expect the elementary schoolers to be able to label a detailed diagram of muscle internal anatomy. I don’t really expect them to be able to explain what we found (and didn’t find) when we pulled apart a Grantia specimen a few weeks ago, either. As much as I’m a – excuse me – sponge for facts sometimes, facts are not the point here. There are other things I’m hoping to impart to my students as we pick apart everything from a porifera to a frog.

Getting your ‘ews’ out
Dissection is on the face of it, a pretty gross act. Formalin smells. Gut contents can feature heavily when, for example, you’re cutting up an earthworm. We have, learned from the people around us, picked up this idea that anatomy is icky and that animal bodies – and by extension our own – are therefore taboo, disgusting things. We moved past the ‘ew’ phase pretty quickly in our worm lessons, and there’s a culture of respect coming out.
Activation of Interest
“Ugh, we going to cut something up?” in the first week from one of the boys, became “please can we dissect next week too?” within the course of an hour. Because, honestly? Getting your hands on a real, once living animal and being able to see a part of it you never have (and, let’s be honest, the ‘ew’ factor) is fun. It’s not something you do often (at least, not until you realize that every meal time is actually a dissection class, and your friends vow never to eat chicken in front of you again) and it’s exciting. Igniting a kid’s interest in science is rarely more complicated than showing them a new way to explore.
Experience gives Meaning
It’s nice to know things. But knowledge means absolutely nothing until you’ve seen, heard, felt, experienced something. I’m looking out of the storefront right now at a New York street being covered in snow. I know that snow is cold, but I understand how cold it is and even what cold means because I have stood outside in snow and been cold and wet and felt the bite. It’s all very well telling kids that bivalves have gills that serve the same function as a fish’s gills until they’ve seen, touched felt, accessed those gills themselves. No one wants to hear me lecture. Not when the alternative is experience.
Repetition and Familiarity
There’s a reason we started with sponges: they are relatively simple, there’s not too much to see (although, as with everything, what there is depends on the experience of your eye and the knowledge of what to look for.) While I tend to avoid discussion of ‘primitive’ and ‘advanced’ in zoology, getting used to guts and hearts and muscles will come in handy when faced with the detailed interior of a frog.
Conceptual Framework
One word I have no intention of bringing up in class is “homology” – although I expect that one or two of the 9/10 year olds will eventually ask a question that will force it out of me. We’re creating a biodiversity catalog, we’re not discussing evolutionary relationships. (We only have an hour a week. We only have time for taxonomy and anatomy.) I’m not going to discuss how bilateral and radial symmetry may have evolved. But we have seen some animals that are symmetrical in a mirror and some that are rotational. We’ve seen that the digestive system has some important similarities among phyla. When it comes to vertebrates, the heart, lungs, skeleton, stomach will be right there. I don’t care whether or not someone will be able to say exactly what a mollusc has in common with a frog, but once you look inside, the similarities are there. And when they are ready to start thinking about the interrelationships between animals, ourselves included, they will always have the memory of exactly how alike we all are underneath.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Debi Watches Arrow (sydht!) 1.13: Betrayal

2013-02-08T02:53:25Z

This should have been a really great episode! And in some ways the show’s definitely coming into its own. Tr0uble is, now they’re bringing all the plot threads together it’s becoming obvious which are really thin indeed. So much for Oliver’s character development from a random murderer to someone who feels bad about murder. So much, also, for Quentin being an actual interesting character?

OTOH, the show’s starting to build up towards some things, the Island plot is becoming something approaching mildly interesting, and the grown ups’ plot if becoming the plot of the show.

Sadly, a ridiculously small amount of Thea, and no Mckenna, or Carly, who I always like to see more of.

Theme of the episode: family and friends going behind each other’s backs. Hence: BETRAYAL.

We are introduced to the Villain of the Week in short order and with no mystery: Cyrus Vanch. On being paroled from Iron Heights, he and his girlfriend Vivian head straight over to his lawyer’s house, where he kills said lawyer and moves straight in. Because he’s eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil. And played by David Anders. And dressed by the same people who dressed Count Punchable last episode. And even though it’s obvious that he is just going to be VotW, I wonder right from the very beginning why they didn’t name this character Werner Vertigo.

When your uninteresting David Anders VotW is more interesting than your Count Vertigo character, you might be doing Green Arrow wrong. Yes, I’m still mad about that.

Meanwhile, Ollie has told Diggle about The List situation from last episode. That is: Felicity had a book that matched Robert’s Book Of Names. She said Walter had it before he went missing, and he told her that he got it from Moira. So it’s a case of who to believe: Walter or Moira?

(Or secret option #3: Felicity is a criminal genius who is playing everyone off against each other.)

Ollie, obviously, doesn’t want to believe anything bad of his mother, but Diggle falls on the side of the person who is missing.

ISLAND FLASHBACK Ollie follows Yao Fei’s map, and it leads him to the wreckage of a crashed aeroplane. Which presumably, Fyers doesn’t know about? In the plane, he is ambushed by a man with an Australian accent and a really big knife, but by using the magic words “Yao Fei sent me,” Ollie manages to not be killed. END FLASHBACK

Quentin is being re-assigned off the Hoodguy case because apparently public opinion is turning towards this multiple-murderer, on account of how the people he’s murdering are also bad guys. Quentin’s beginning to com off as a single-minded obsessive, which is even more annoying given that the guy he’s obsessing over catching has, in the last four months, killed more people than half the individuals on this list.

Ollie decides to do what so few people do on telly nowadays: he goes direct to his mother with The Book, hands it to her and asks her what’s up. He spins a story about Walter giving it to Ollie before he disappeared, and it’s worth noting that between Walter disappearing and Felicity going to Ollie, the names have become permanently visible in white light, without needed ridiculous glasses (because they were ridiculous). Moira acts confused: telling Ollie it’s a notebook in which Robert was keeping a list of people who owed him favors.

So both the Books were written in the same handwriting: They were both Robert’s? Why two notebooks, Robert?

Following up on the previous stories about Robert’s affairs, Moira assures Ollie that Robert was keeping secrets, she has no idea what it means and if looking into this got Walter in trouble, they should stay out of it. She throws the book into the fire.

No one seems particularly interested in using the book to locate Walter. I understand Moira’s reluctance, but Ollie must really hate his stepfather.

Single Thea appearance of the episode: Laurel is going her around CNRI and introduces her to “Anatasia,” the new ‘woman in Laurel’s office’ now that Joanna is On a Bus. Anatasia relates the news of Cyrus Vanch’s release due to lack of evidence: CNRI are representing a victims’ advocacy group trying to keep him interred The DA Kate Spencer has pre-emptively told Laurel not to bother her because they still need evidence.

Laurel’s resulting rant about how evil Vanch is, is interrupted when Tommy calls, asking her to come along to a tasting audition for chefs in the club. She agrees, but cuts the call short; Anatasia mentioned a ‘private police force’ needed to keep Vanch from resuming criminal activities, and guess what Laurel has in her pocket?

Ollie and Diggle are arguing about how to deal with the Moira situation (Hooding up and threatening her vs believing everything she says on face value) when the Arrow Phone rings. Laurel asks him for help finding evidence to fight Vanch, and Ollie would rather do that then face up to his other problem, so off he goes.

Remember how Laurel got that phone? The bug Quentin planted on it lights up and he gets right to his feet, ready to organize a task force to catch Hoodguy.

Cyrus and Vivian are having dinner in their well-guarded Lawyer’s House, chatting about the power vacuum left by Hoodguy and Huntress taking out the leaders of the Triad and the Bertinelli Organization, and how Vanch would like in on that. He plans to do “something spectacular” to get the attention and respect of these organizations that apparently have been headless chickens since the last time they appeared on the show.

Vanch’s inspiration comes in the form of the deaths-by-arrows by a lot of his guards, and the appearance of a bugged arrow in the pillar by his dinner table. He just needs to find and kill the Big Guy in town! Flawless plan!

Laurel and Tommy are cute-ing it up to go taste foods when the Arrow Phone rings; Laurel excuses herself with “it’s work” and arranges a meeting with Hoodguy on the rooftop of the Winick Building in 30 minutes. I guess no building in Starling City has secured roof access? Anyway, Quentin is of course listening in, and mobilizes his task force, using rubber bullets as a concession to the fact that his daughter’s going to be there in the crossfire.

Note to Non-Comics Readers: Judd Winick was a writer on Green Arrow and Green Arrow/Black Canary in the early 21st century. I… don’t recommend his work.

Nameless Black Cop is back! Acting as the voice of ‘are you sure you’re not taking this a bit far?’ for Quentin.

Meanwhile, Diggle has upgraded to the Grown-Ups Plot. He is filling in for Moira’s driver Ricky, who has conveniently failed to show up for work for the first time in six years. (Disappeared in mysterious and as yet unexplained circumstances?) The work involves driving her places then sneakily following her in, getting caught and making an excuse about needing the bathroom.

It is so freaking good to see Diggle doing something actually proactive rather than offering Ollie suggestions to be ignored

Anyway, Hoodguy and Laurel meet on the rooftop in magical doesn’t-get-you-wet rain. Ollie hands her a recording of the conversation he recorded with his Listening Arrow, and then Quentin and task force run out, guns ready. Ollie quickly takes Laurel as a hostage, backs towards the edge of the rooftop, apologizes to her, then makes his escape. Quentin follows him, down onto a fire escape and into a stairwell. A great deal is made about how FOCUSED and ANGRY Quentin is, but Ollie gets the drop on him, knocks him out, and escapes.

Laurel, obviously, isn’t happy about the whole lying-to-her using-her-as-a-sting deliberately-putting-her-in-the-crossfire situation, and gives it to her dad in both ears, yelling about how his hate for Hoodguy has blinded him to his own family. She also suggests that Quentin blames Hoodguy for the death of Sara, his wife leaving and his alcoholism? I’m not sure, but I think all of that was Ollie’s fault. Does Laurel know something?

She slams the ArrowPhone down on Quentin’s desk and storms out.

In a great show of bucking the trend when it comes to lying to your friends and family, Diggle tells Ollie straight up that he’s driving Moira around, keeping an eye on her. Ollie is angry – but he’s already angry at Quentin for using Laurel, so there’s some projection.

Laurel rails to Tommy about being uses by her father, and it comes out that she’s been in possession and using the Arrow Phone. Tommy fairly sees this as lying to him, and also as hanging out with a murderer.

“You sound like my father,” Laurel says, as if this doesn’t stop Hoodguy from, y’know, being a murderer.

Oh hey, guess what? Vanche’s girlfriend/moll/minion (I’m actually not sure which. Competent female employee!) Vivian has a ‘contact’ in the police force! And now she knows that they used Laurel to flush out Hoodguy which means Vanche now knows that Laurel is an effective way of getting to Hoodguy.

NNCR: “Use of girlfriend to flush out hero” is the oldest trope in the book. I’m pretty sure even people who have never read a comic in their lives know that if you want to get Superman, you kidnap Lois. Yes, it even works when the girlfriend in question is the superhero Black Canary. Yes, it’s sexist and boring. No, it’s never going away, ever.

Ollie and Tommy talk about the nightclub for the whole of two seconds before Tommy changes it to Laurel and how she’s hanging out with Hoodguy and how jealous he is.

“We both know she has a pretty strong track record of being attracted to guys who are dangerous, who break the rules.”

NNCR: Craig Windrow; Ra’s Al Ghul; Archer Braun; Yeeeeeeeeeeep.

Ollie’s advice? Talk to her, get everything all out in the open, and fix it.

ISLAND FLASHBACK Ollie tells the guy who is clearly about to be his new mentor about the map and “Shengcun,” and New Mentro explains that Yao Fei and he were working to get into a airfield about 10k from the crash site, before Yao Fei was compromised and they were separated. He hands Ollie a vicious looking blade and tells him that he thinks Yao Fei sent him to help take the airfield. “If you’re going to have my back, I need to know you can cover it.” The he attacks Ollie and an extremely brief sword class begins. It ends when Ollie admits to leaving Yao Fei to be captured, and New Mentor knocks him out END FLASHBACK

Laurel is at home, leaving a message on Tommy’s phone to try and make amends, when the doorbell rings. It’s Vanch and team! Laurel does an awesome job of self defence, beating the crap out of minions with elbows, feet, umbrellas, doors and glass fronted cabinets, until Vanch steps in and tazes her to the floor.

Diggle’s project of driving Moira around and spying on her leads them to a business called Faquet-Lemaitre Consulting to see her “accountant.” As I assume she’s been doing all along, Moira suggests Diggle wait out in the car. As I assume he’s been doing all along, Diggle ignores her and sneaks in after her. He ends up in a janitor’s closet next to the office she walked into, and he digs out a listening device and starts listening (and recording) through the wall.

(Faquet-Lemaitre isn’t from comics, but it is the name of a set decorator on the show)

Moira is meeting with John Barrowmerlyn! She reports on her success in dissuading Carl Ballard from messing with “The Undertaking.” Barrowmerlyn thanks her and adds another favor – can she please clear out the warehouse? You know, the one with the Queen’s Gambit in it? Because he doesn’t want anyone to find the evidence for the sabotage.

At this point, Diggle is interrupted by building security. They dance around each other, and then Diggle pulls out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. He was just smoking in this closet!

Bullet dodged.

Tommy goes to Laurel’s apartment to talk things out, and walks into an empty apartment showing signs of a struggle. Terrified, he finds the recording arrow left by Cyrus: Dear Hooded Vigilante: I think we should meet, Y/N? Love, the guy who’s about to cut bits off this girl. xx.

Tommy takes it to Quentin, who takes no time at all in figuring out that the only people who knew Laurel was connected to Hoodguy were his fellow police officers. With no one to turn to, he picks up the ArrowPhone and makes a call.

But Diggle gets there first, giving the recording device to Ollie, who gets to listen to his mother talk about “The Undertaking,” (this is the thing that would kill lots of people and would be ruined by gentrifying the Glades, just so we’re on the same page), but more importantly, confess that she knew the Queen’s Gambit was sabotaged: and Robert, Sarah, and everyone on that yacht was murdered. (Well, Ollie focuses on Robert, but you know.)

Fortunately, the phone rings before Ollie has to deal with it. Time to rescue Laurel!

ISLAND FLASHBACK TIME Ollie wakes up to find himself tied to a chair. New Mentor is there to explain that - now bear with me I don’t really follow the logic – NM needs to take an airstrip, but he can’t take it alone, so he has to kill Ollie because Ollie might get caught and tortured and give him up, but he knocked him out and tied him to a chair because – no, I lost it. It’s a test, anyway. Ollie dislocates a thumb while NM is talking, and gets out of his bonds. This passes the test, and NM introduces himself as Slade Wilson, and says he’s going to train him. END FLASHBACK

NNCR: Slade Wilson is the name of Deathstroke, superpowered one-eyed mercenary, worst father in the DCU, and wearer of the same mask as that guy whose been wearing a mask and hanging out with Fyers and the ganag all this time.

Hoodguy and Quentin meet on a rooftop, and Quentin explains about the mole in his precinct and how Hoodguy is the only one he can trust. Hoodguy says that Cyrus is holed up in a fortified mansion he can’t take on his own. But hey. they can work together, right?

At the mansion, Cyrus has Laurel tied to a chair at a dinner table, where he can menace and evil at her. Laurel’s reaction? To list the crimes he’s just committed and promise that he’ll rot for life this time.

The following scene is actually a mastery of archery-vigilante TV making. Cryus monologues about the men he has guarding them – men with assault rifles of 600rpm, snipers, &c, intercut with scenes of Ollie actually taking them down. The best part of the entire episode, actually, is this superb display of Queenery. (Fans of DC’s Arkham games may be grinning as much as me.) I can’t decide if it’s great or silly when Cyrus explains he counted exactly how many arrows Hoodguy takes on a sting with him, and discovered it was consistently twenty-four, just as the final guard with a gun finds Ollie, and SURPRISE, that’s #25.

I’m falling on the side of silly, because really.

Guard walks Hoodguy into the dining room with Cyrus, Vivian and Laurel, and is just about to shoot him, when he himself is shot – by Quentin, whose part in this teamwork was to hang back until the absolute last minute then swoop in. Apparently.

Ollie knocks Vivian out while Quentin storms in, gun pointing at Vanch, yelling at him. Before he can pull the trigger, however, Ollie knocks the gun out of his hands. “I’m the vigilante. You’re the cop!”

See, Ollie (who has just killed 24 men) can’t let Quentin kill the man who actually masterminded the kidnap and potential torture of his daughter. That would be wrong!

NNCR: Ollie once killed some people who had imprisoned and tortured Dinah. It was a REALLY BIG DEAL.

Quentin punches Vanch out instead. Ollie flees the scene, and Quentin is left to rescue his daughter.

Back at the police station, Laurel obviously has trauma, and Quentin offers to take her home, but she refuses. The break of trust is too big, and she needs some time apart. Katie and Paul are on top form, here.

Hoodguy is waiting for her in the parking lot. He’s here to check up on her and suggest they take a break from each other. He hadn’t realized this would put her in danger, you see! (Laurel did know it, she says, and went into it with her eyes open, but Ollie doesn’t want Laurel to be making those decisions for herself!)

Tommy arrives and Hoodguy disappears. Laurel apologizes to Tommy for lying, but he’s not having it, just happy to see her alive. Ollie watches from a rooftop, but I don’t even care about this love triangle anymore. Tommy/Laurel has my heart.

ISLAND FLASHBACK TIME. Slade’s big plan for taking the airfield starts with training Ollie. told to pick a weapon, Ollie goes to a big chest and, among some guns, finds a mask. THE mask, in fact. The Deathstroke mask that Ollie immediately recognizes as belonging to the guy who tortured him. No wait, you don’t understand! Slade says. His partner and he are ASIS, and wore the masks to hide their identities. They came here to free Yao Fei. Fyers story about them being prisoners was a lie! Honestly, I have no idea what’s going on anymore. END FLASHBACK

NNCR: In comics continuity, Fyers is usually an ally and sometimes a friend of Ollie. Deathstroke is definitely definitely not. Also, AFAIK, Deathstroke doesn’t have a partner.

Back in the ArrowCave, Diggle and Ollie decide the moral of the episode is that blind trust can be dangerous, tying it into last week’s “Trust but Verify.”

And finally Ollie knows that the Squiggle Organization is doing an Undertaking! I hereby call them the Squiggle Undertakers. Ollie’s first step in undermining the undertaking?

“Mom… I mean, Moira Queen? YOU HAVE FAILED THIS CITY!”

Verdict? Fantastially plotted, thematically sound, and I really like where the Squiggle plot is going. This would be a great episode, if it wasn’t for Hoodguy being back to an indiscriminate goon-killer, with the only person who still thinks murder is wrong, being portrayed as an inconsistent, irrational lover.

Sorry, Quentin, you deserve better.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Love Meme

2013-02-06T00:07:57Z

It's nearly Valentines Day! There's one of those Love Meme thingamebobs happening over here.

My thread.

This post is also posted at InnerBrat @ Dreamwidth where it has comments. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Knowing Physics makes Biology Awesome

2013-02-05T20:36:24Z

There is a belief knocking around somewhere in our cultural rhetoric, that “children have favorites,” and by the time we’re adults we have to have grown out of that silliness and show no ridiculous, unfounded partiality. Bollocks to that. My favorite color is purple, my favorite dinosaur is Euoplocephalus and my favorite butterfly is, without a doubt, the Blue Morpho.

Morpho rhetenor – picture by Didier Descouens from Wikipedia

And why? Well the short answer is BECAUSE PHYSICS.

There’s a long answer too.

Blue Morpho is a common name that covers a number of butterflies in the Morpho genus. I’m not specific in my favoritism, although I will admit some aesthetic preferences. Morpho are predominately forest dwellers from South America, and are particularly well known for the iridescent colors of their wings. These colors may be for defense against predators (aposematism and Müllerian mimicry) – but as it’s a male feature, it’s probably for sexual selection, despite the similarity in human perception between the different species. The very best thing about Blue Morphos is – they’re not actually pigmented.

You remember how color works from school, right? White light is a mixture lightwaves of varying colors, that can be diffracted out under the right circumstances, such as atmospheric moisture or the use of a prism.

image credit: Adam-Hart Davis, taken from Starts With a Bang!

Most blue things look blue because they absorb non-blue light and reflect blue light. (Added complication, because of the way we perceive colors: blue pigments may either reflect blue light or reflect a combination of light colors that our eyes and brain perceive as blue. For my purposes, ‘reflect blue’ is fine.)

BUT it’s not that ‘some light is blue’ – blue and other colors are how we perceive light of different wave lengths. the longest wavelength visible to human perception is red, the shortest is violet.

So – with most blue things, what is happening is the molecules of the object selectively absorbing appropriate wavelengths of light so only light with a pretty short wavelength is being reflected, and we perceive that as blue.

With me so far?

Why are Morphos different? Because their blue comes not from absorbing non-blue light, but by reflecting the light in multiple directions in such a way that it appears blue. This is called optical interference, and you’ve seen it on soap bubbles.

Image credit: wikipedia

A bubble consists of a volume of air enclosed by a thin film of a transparent material – soapy water – outside of which there is air again. There are therefore two surfaces from which light can be reflected – the outer air/water boundary, and the inner water/air boundary. The light that is reflected from the inner surface has to travel further than that reflected in the outer surface, but because the film is so thin, this difference is comparable to the wavelength of visible light (390-700 nm).

Last bit of physics, I promise!

Interference happens when two waves pass through the same point, and either combine to form a larger wave at that point (constructive interference), or cancel each other out (destructive interference.) It helps to think of the ‘peaks and troughs’ of sine-like wave here:

Screencap from Wikipedia

When white light is reflected off the inside and outside of a soap bubble, some wavelengths (colors) end up ‘in phase’ – peaks coincide because the thin film is an exact multiple of that wavelength – experience constructive interference, and therefore look brighter, and other wavelengths (colors) end up ‘out of phase’ – peaks coincide with troughs – experience destructive interference and therefore are blacked out altogether. The result is a rainbow of colors without the bubble actually absorbing any light. (Varying colors come from the curve of the bubble and a non-uniform thickness of the film.)

So: Blue Morphos!

Morpho peleides, from the ANSP - image credit Wikipedia

Lepidoptera – butterflies and moths – have wings that are covered in tiny scales. We learn very early on in our careers as tiny naturalists that it hurts a butterfly if you manhandle their wings, because these scales flake off relatively easily, leaving a powder like substance on our fingers. The iridescent quality of Morphos comes, as I said, not from any pigment, but from the microstructure of these scales.

Cross section of a scale from the wing of M. rhetenor. Scale=3 μm. Image credit: Vukusic et al. 1999

The scale bar on this image is 3μm, = 3000 nm, = 4 times the longest wavelength of visible red light, 7 times the wavelength of blue light.

Morpho scales are not flat surfaces, but are made up of lots of combed barbs on the micrometer scale, creating multiple surfaces from which light is reflected. Because the barbs are about 200nm apart, half the wavelength of blue light, it is blue light that undergoes constructive interference, and the longer wavelengths suffer destructive interference.

Simple, right?

Well, I simplified it. It is of course, like everything in the world ever, much more complicated than that. There’s a complex intersection of interference, and diffractive scattering. Some Morphos even have two layers of scales – a colorless layer of ‘glass scales’ overlaying their blue ‘ground scales’, which increases the angular range in which the color is visible.

Morpho iridescence is clearly different from that seen in many beetles, and in birds. It appears more limited in color, for example. But spectral analysis suggests that a greater diversity in the ultraviolet range, so butterflies that can see in that spectrum will have an easier time distinguishing species.

But – assuming that irridescent structures are more complex than producing pigment – why go to all the trouble just to look pretty? As far as sexual selection goes, there’s no upper limit on the extreme ridiculousness – ask birds. But Morphos have a much higher visibility range than pigmented butterflies – they can be seen from further away. Vukusic et al (1999) suggest that Morphos aren’t looking to attract females, so much as communicate to other males to keep rivals away. Like much communication, the longer the effective range, the more likely it is to succeed.

Also? they look really really pretty.

PHYSICS. Making butterflies better since the Eocene!*

*(Probably. I have no idea when Morpho made their first appearance.)

References

Kinoshita, S., Yoshioka, S., & Kawagoe, K. (2002). Mechanisms of structural colour in the Morpho butterfly: cooperation of regularity and irregularity in an iridescent scale Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 269 (1499), 1417-1421 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2002.2019

Kinoshita, S., Yoshioka, S., Fujii, Y., & Okamoto, N. (2002). Photophysics of Structural Color in the Morpho Butterflies Forma, (17), 103–121

Vukusic, P., Sambles, J., Lawrence, C., & Wootton, R. (1999). Quantified interference and diffraction in single Morpho butterfly scales Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 266 (1427), 1403-1411 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.1999.0794

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Return of the Sun

2013-02-05T04:31:21Z

January has traditionally been a dreadful month for me; don’t particularly know why, except a generic “winter is depressing” truism. But it’s never surprising when I get into a slump and do nothing productive for the entire month – or longer, usually until March.

This year was no different: in fact, if you’d asked me how I was doing over the last few weeks, I would probably have answered with “I have a case of the Januaries,” which is the only way I can think of to say “I don’t want to d anything xcept sit on the couch and play Heroes of Might and Magic but I have nothing specific to complain about” – you know, except for the general ambiguous employment situation.

I distracted myself with knitting, and costume-making, and TV, and sat it out. And taught, of course, at the museum and StoSci. But I couldn’t get productivity going; I hid from AIM, I let correspondence fall into the dirt, I sustained a roleplay silence fo weeks, which is kind of unlike me.

[Yesterday I threw Tara Chace into sandboxes. If you fannish RP on LJ/DW, you should find me. If this sentence makes no sense to you, you should ignore it.]

Then today, I got up, and I didn’t turn on the games and let my morning fall away. I walked out to the post office to mail a parcel I’d been sitting on for a couple days. And I picked up the stuff for the next parcels I need to send out, instead of getting it all at the post office day of. And then I paid in many paychecks. And then I bought a battery to replace the dead one in my watch.

And then I rocked into work, prepared the crap out of class, and taught an excellent class to a group of enthusiastic first graders about butterfly (and moth! I was picked up on my neglect of the greater part of lepidoptera) adaptations.

Basically, my day rocked. And the reason I haven’t been on AIM/tagging this evening? I’ve been to tired, not too depressed.

Bring it, February.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Storytime: W/E 03/02/2013

2013-02-03T17:27:58Z

Books

Alpha - Greg Rucka

Currently Reading A Place of Greater Safety - Hillary Mantel

Comics

Hawkeye #7

Punisher: War Zone #4

T.V.

Parks and Recreation 3.03 through 4.18

Young Justice: Invasion ep 13 "Fix It"

Arrow 112 "Vertigo"

Gaksital 20-24

Twelve Kingdoms 09-11

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries 83 "Corporate Interview" | 84 "Ugh"

The Lydia Bennet 29 "Good Enough"
Pemberley Digital 1 "Demonstration" | 2 "Messages"

I HAVE ALL THE FEELINGS. We should talk, yes?

This post is also posted at InnerBrat @ Dreamwidth where it has comments. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Greg Rucka – Alpha

2013-02-03T00:17:11Z

Two things that influence my ability to give Alpha a perfectly unbiased review:

1) Greg Rucka is a favorite writer of mine, and has created and written some of my all time favorite characters, such as Tara Chace, Renee Montoya and Kate Kane.

2) I really really irrationally dislike reading books in the present tense. It disorients me and takes adjusting to, and because more often than not a story contains scenes or elements that take place before the ‘now’ of the book, sometimes necessitates a tense switch that just annoys me more.

So there are two conflicting elements here. Eventually Rucka’s ability to tell a gripping complex story won me over, even though I still found myself thrown out of the story by, not just the tense but rather a lot of unnecessary sentence fragments. Yes, it did lend the book a suitable feeling of raised pace and urgency, but none of the Atticus Kodiak or Queen and Country books needed this.

I’m being harsh. I liked the book!

The plot, as intricate and well supported as any Rucka thriller, deals a terror attack on a fictitious version of Disneyland, told through the major viewpoints of the man hired to carry out the attack, and Jad Bell, the Navy SEAL placed in the park to deter it. Oh, and also Athena, Bell’s Deaf teenage daughter.

I can’t talk about the plot without spoilers – and you don’t want to be spoiled for this – but I will say that it is a terrific thrill ride. The characters were fine, but took a back seat to the structure of the plot, and didn’t come off as especially interesting. The handling of that dialogue that was signed was fantastic, but Athena didn’t seem particularly strongly developed beyond her language. She’s a teenage girl who is interested in a boy and who is sad her parents are divorced. Her father is the Navy SEAL version of John McClane: he’s going through a divorce and he’s sad about it, but distracted by action.

It’s an action book, not a character book. Read it for the action and you won’t be disappointed. But if you really want a top-notch Rucka thriller, go pick up Queen and Country. Trust me.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Debi Watches Arrow (sydht!) 1.12: Vertigo

2013-02-01T23:51:26Z

This is late this week because I’ve been having a less than optimal few days with a cold and a general feeling of ‘meh,’ so I didn’t write this yesterday, deciding to watch Gaksital and Parks and Rec instead.

But this isn’t a bad episode! It’s not an amazing episode either: I found it kind of boring for the drama it was supposed to bring to the series, and goodness did they ever ruin an opportunity for an interesting villain. However, it is actually cohesive to the extent that I realize I cannot keep to my organization by subplots anymore. Back to chronological recapping!

Bond Cold Open! As opposed to a Batman Cold Open, which is unrelated to the plot and just showcases the hero’s skills, in this case, the man being run to ground by Maninnahood is a drug dealer – specifically a dealer of Vertigo, which if you remember from last week, is the drug Thea got high on last episode before driving herself into a ditch.

Ollie pins the guy to a girder by the man’s sleeve and proceeds to yell at him. Don’t be scared of your boss, he yells, he scared of ME! It’s like the worst of any of Nolan/Bale’s Batman scenes: “SWEAR TO MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” I don’t know if we’re supposed to be scared of Ollie when he does this, but like Bale, he comes off as laughably silly. Drug dealer guy is scared, though. Scared enough to give him a moniker: “The Count.”

Note to Non-Comics Readers: Count Warner Vertigo is a long standing Green Arrow/Black Canary villain. An actual Count of the fictional Eastern European Country Vlatava, Vertigo has the ability to disrupt the balance and coordination of his opponents. He’s a pretty interesting villain, really, and I’m kind of sad that they played this card so early in the show.

In the ArrowCave, Ollie and Diggle exposit and we learn that Ollie’s been running after the Vertigo dealers for days, working it hard. Diggle, however, turns Ollie right back around and points him at his family. Thea’s hearing is today and she needs her brother.

At the hearing, Thea’s counsel explains that they’ve reached a plea arrangement: at the time of arrest Thea was still 2 days short of 18, and the prosecutors have agreed to probation. The judge, however, throws this out, to make a point: he makes a snide remark about the Queens sweeping Thea’s priors under the rug (AFAICT, this is entirely made up) and claims the DA is trying to avoid dealing the Vertigo problem. Therefore, he’s going to use Thea Queen as a “poster child” (his words) for Vertigo, and Make An Example of her by bringing her to trial.

Agh.

[Laurel enters the courtroom in time to hear the judge's tirade, and Ollie notices. ]

But at Queen Manor, their attorney promises to do what he can, but that they should start preparing themselves for a bad outcome. It’s a stressful time for everyone, and Thea deals with stress the way she usually deals with stress! By throwing spiteful remarks at her mother about cheating on Walter and storming out. Moira rants mildly at Ollie about how the judge is just looking for someone to make an example of.

“Why does it have to be her?”

“Maybe it doesn’t.”

Ollie, demonstrating a very comics!Ollie grasp on secret identity, tells Moira he has to “go do something,” related to that. On the way:

ISLAND FLASHBACK TIME: Ollie in a cage now, confronted Yao Fei, demanding to know why he’s now working for Fyers, and why he even bothered keeping Ollie safe if he was going to turn him over. He asks Yao Fei to get him out, and gets only “I can’t” in reply. END FLASHBACK

Ollie’s lead takes him to the vice squad (is vice squad the right phrase?) of the SCPD, where he asks after “Det. Hall,” and encounters an old girlfriend: Mckenna Hall.

Just when you thought this show had hit maximum eyecandy potential.

Mckenna and Ollie discuss their heavy partying background, and then Ollie cuts straight to his needing to know about Vertigo for Thea’s sake. Ollie suggests that maybe they could find the dealer, because I’m sure that never occurred to the vice squad. He namedrops “the Count” like he’s doing them a big favor, and Mckenna says they’ve known about him for months, but hey, random ex-boyfriend who just turned up out of nowhere, have the entire police file on the Count.

No really, she just hands it over. I guess she thinks this is flirting? After Ollie leaves, Quentin appears as if from nowhere (where has he been these last few episodes?) and is grouchy.

Time to meet the Count! And in a minute of his appearance I’m glad they decided to use him as a Villain of the Week. In a wide-lapelled trenchcoat and a large crucifix around his neck, Seth Gabel’s Count is apparently modelled on a hybrid of Robert Pattinson in Twilight and Keifer Sutherland in Lost Boys and I’m already bored. He’s meeting with the dealer Maninnahood hung up in the Cold Open, and blah blah making an example blah blah injects him with Vertigo from two syringes in the neck.

I refuse to relate the biochemibabble he monologues while doing so. Who cares? ODing on Vertigo is really bad, mmkay? Count offers Dealer a gun with one bullet in it, Dealer shoots self rather than continue to live with the pain.

NNCR: Count Vertigo is not, in comics continuity, a vampire or even looks like a vampire.

Note for anyone else: Not all Eastern/Central European Counts are vampires.

Additional: I’m bloody sick of vampires.

You know what I’m not sick of? Laurel and Tommy domestic sceness. Even if they have to be ruined by Windows product placement (ugh), they are working out little kinks like morning person/evening person incompatibility (guess which is which) when they are interrupted by Ollie, wanting to talk to Laurel. She says that the hard line stance of the Judge’s is a platform for his reelection, and Ollie asks her to talk to Quentin to talk to the judge, for him. Again with the subpar Secret Identity milarky, Ollie says he’s working on something right now, but if that doesn’t come through, he needs Lance help.

Laurel tracks her father down. He’s particularly keen on any Queen having to face the full force of the law, but Laurel insists that Thea’s just a reckless kid and deserves a second chance. I have no idea why she goes this route, but she suddenly decides to compare Thea to Sara, and Quentin isn’t buying it. They discuss idealized memories of people, which is clearly more there to mirror Moira’s portrait of Robert than it is to advance Thea’s plot. Laurel does reveal a rather unhealthy way of looking at her friend’s sister, though: as all the potential that Sara had at that age. I’m sure this image of another person won’t go wrong.

“She doesn’t need prison,” says Laurel, “she needs help.”

Ollie is taking Diggle on a fieldtrip! To the Starling City HQ of the Bratva, remember how Ollie’s a captain in that criminal organization? Yeah.

Ollie tells them he wants to “get into pharmaceuticals.” Specifically Vertigo. So could they organize a meeting with the Count? Ollie offers the file that Mckenna randomly decided to give him, as a gift to get his attention.

(I don’t know who to react to that.)

In return, the Bratva man insists on one of my least favorite tropes of all time: Prove you are on our side by killing this guy!

(The only time this has been done well is when Deadshot, going undercover for the Suicide Squad, proves that he’s on their side by shooting an ‘undercover FBI agent!’ much to the annoyance of the government people listening to his wire. “We don’t have any agents in that organization.” “Lawton doesn’t know that!”)

Brtava man also namedrops Anatoli Knyazev as someone who “speaks very highly of” Ollie. Ollie explains that he saved his life.

NNCR: Anatoli Knyazev, aka. KGBeast was a cold-war era supervillain in the DCU, trained as a Soviet Assassin. After the collapse of the USSR, he became a mercenary for hire. His main point of interest is… being Russian.

Anyway, Ollie chokes the guy out as asked to, and the pulse check confirms his death. Diggle is clearly uncomfortable watching his best friend murder someone, but hey! Ollie previously told him to “go with it,” so it’s got to be okay, right?

ISLAND FLASHBACK: Yao Fei lets Ollie out of his cage and walks him over to where the other mercenaries are standing in a circle, watching Deathstroke beat the crap out of another prisoner, before killing him. When Fyers asks for anyone else to try, Yao Fei pushes Ollie into the ring. Fyers explains that the point of having mercenaries murder prisoners is to “strengthen unit cohesion,” therefore Yao Fei has to be the one to fight Ollie. Obviously. END FLASHBACK

Ollie and Diggle walk the body out to the parking lot, and Diggle is still mildly peeved that Ollie killed him. Dumping the body in the trunk of a car, Ollie hits a pressure point on the guy’s neck and BAM he’s awake.

Diggle: That’s a neat trick. You going to teach me that one day?

Ollie: No.

NNCR: This is a move that many people in comics could plausibly pull off, among them Dinah Lance and probably Batman. It’s not really a Green Arrow thing. Go with it.

Ollie knocks the poor sod out again and slams the trunk shut, telling Diggle to arrange a new identity for him and get him out of the city.

Diggle’s army training: Not so much about fighting, than on the forging new identities.

Laurel and Ollie have a sit down chat with Thea. Turns out Quentin went to chat with Judge Brackett and managed to talk him down Thea tries the “nobody asked you” line on Laurel and Ollie points out that he did, which Thea’s not altogether happy with. The new arrangement is 500 hours community service and 2 years probation, with someone to act as in loco parentis. Laurel volunteers to be Thea’s Responsible Adult.

NNCR: Dinah Lance was instrumental in the rehabilitation of the first comics!Speedy. She looked after Roy throughout his first night cold turkey, and developed a strong parental bond with him that was much more than just dating his fake!dad.

Thea says no thank you, she chooses jail.

WTF, says Ollie, that’ll ruin your life. Turns out, Thea’s more interested in ruining Moira’s life! Hooray for idiotic, spiteful teenagers! WTF, says Ollie again. And because he can’t think of anything else to say, he says that Moira didn’t cheat on Robert, Robert cheated on Moira. Also, Ollie gives the first hint of actually telling his family some stuff, and tells Thea that Robert admitted failing the family before his death. Obviously, Oliver is talking about being a Squiggle guy, and I still hope that the ‘betrayal’ Moira was talking about was opting out of the Squiggle. Drag Robert’s name through the mud for your own ends, people! GO!

When Thea storms out, it turns out that Moira was listening, and she gives an ‘how dare you’ before Diggle rescues him with news about the meeting with the Count!

Waiting for the meeting, Bratva guy decides to tell Ollie “Why they call him the Count.”

You’ll never guess.

Because in developing the drug he used to use two needles to stab people in the neck, leaving puncture marks on the bodies.

AGH ENOUGH WITH THE VAMPIRE IMAGERY.

Count turns up and gives another boring monologue about all the people he killed in testing. Ollie and Diggle both deserve medals for not punching him in his annoying face. Or maybe they’re about to, because then the police arrive – Quentin and Mckenna among them. Everyone scarpers under gunfire, and Ollie chases Count Punchable down a stairwell. Count Punchable turns around just as Ollie’s catching up, and stabs him with twin needles right in the chest. That’ll do it, I guess.

Diggle pulls Ollie back to the Arrowcave, strips him of his shirt, and mixes Ollie’s magic drug cureall from the episode with Deadshot. Ollie tries to strangle Diggs first, but Diggs forces the drink down his throat.

ISLAND FLASHBACK: Yao Fei beats a little crap out of Ollie, then chokes him out in exactly the same way that we saw earlier in the episode. END FLASHBACK

When Ollie wakes up, Diggle’s handcuffed him to a table. Allegedly to stop him killing his friend some more, but I reckon it’s because Diggle is into that. Or maybe just because Ollie is doing some stupid shit this episode. He did manage to pull the syringes out of Ollie, Vertigo still intact within it, with the bright idea of analyzing it.

The next morning, Quentin and Mckenna turn up at Queen Manor to talk to Ollie. They had arrived at the Bratva/Count Punchable meeting on information from a Confidential Informant, and Mckenna recognized Oliver himself on the scene.

Well ooops.

Ollie’s story goes like this: he was looking into the Count to hopefully get a visual for the Police Sketch Artist, and paid “some guy with a Russian accent” a lot of money to arrange a meeting. Did he get to see him? No.

No idea why he says that. A sketch would be helpful!

Quentin scowls and storms out. Ollie stops him to thank him for Thea and he says he did it for Laurel, not the Queens.

Moira starts yelling at Ollie for being stupid, and Ollie suggests the “real reason [she's] upset” is because of the Thea-Robert thing. It’s all very contrived and weird and no one seems to be under the right amount of stress for all the crap that’s happening to them right now.

Enter Thea, and Moira has the opportunity to explain herself and talk about preserving Thea’s memories of her father as this perfect ideal. Both ladies finally break down, hug and apologize. This is a touching scene on face value, but even more interesting if Moira’s now digging herself deeper into a mess of lies from the ‘he betrayed me’ line.

Ollie’s new plan is to analyze the liquid Vertigo to um… use the water to pinpoint Count Punchable’s lab? Don’t ask. Just watch as he gets a wave of dizziness from his OD and fall over.

ISLAND FLASHBACK Yao Fei, under Fyers’ watch, disposes of Ollie’s body by pushing him over a cliff into a river. END FLASHBACK

Despite Diggle’s protests that Ollie should be seeing a doctor about the drugs in his system, Ollie decides it’s a good idea to bring the Vertigo, needles and all, to Queen Consolidated and to Felicity Snoak. Because um, IT includes chemical analysis? WHY AM I STILL QUESTIONING THIS SHOW?

Lie to Felicity of the week: Ollie’s “friend” is starting a new energy drink but he won’t tell him the ingredients. Could Felicity please run spectral analysis to locate the factory? It’s still in syringes because, um, Ollie ran out of sports bottles.

Don’t knock it, though. Felicity emails Diggle the results that pinpoint the water source to East Glades and the Bay. where there’s an abandoned juvenile detention center that looks likely. Ollie walks off, but Diggle insists that he not go on account of being still under the influence and woozy. Ollie’s full of RIGHTEOUS JUSTICE and determined to stop the Count, but Diggle holds up a tennis ball and tells Ollie to hit it or stay.

Ollie opts for secret option number 3: leaving without his bow. Because Maninnahood can still land punches and kick and swing over bannisters with perfect accuracy when everything is blurry and spinny. He just can’t shoot a bow, y’see? Also throwing knives. He can throw those when he’s too wibbly to shoot arrows.

I’m too bored even to make screencaps.

Blah blah fight. Blah blah corners Count Punchable (who is wearing a WEREWOLF T-SHIRT FFS), Count Punchable monologues, they fight more. The cops arrive: Mckenna’s CI has provided the address at the exactt same night Ollie found it.

(Mckenna’s CI: Diggs?)

Aaaand Ollie decides to shoot Count Punchable up with Vertigo. Slow, deliberate, with a one-liner. Yep, murderous vindictive Ollie is back. So much for that character development. Sigh.

In comes Quentin with a gun and a chance to yell at the Hood for being a killer and about how disappointed he (Quentin) is that his daughter thinks he (Hood) is a hero. Ollie throws Count Punchable at Quentin and flees the scene, avoiding Mckenna on his way out.

Ollie drops Thea off at Laurel’s office for her community service as a legal clerk? I guess that’s what’s going on here. Ollie thanks Laurel, and she says it’ll be nice to have her around. Mold her into the sister Laurel lost, that kind of thing. This can’t be healthy, right? Anyway, then Mckenna, who is clearly now around to be a temporary love interest, calls up Ollie to announce how Count Punchable is being charged with everything, and also it was great seeing him.

But it doesn’t look like Count Punchable is going to stand trial soon. Cut to Quentin at a hospital, talking to a doctor about how no one has ODed on this much Vertigo and live, and Count punchable being wheeled off, strapped to a gurney, almost literally frothing at the mouth.

I guess this means they’ve set him up to be a recurring villain, but blegh. What a waste of a good comics villain.

ISLAND FLASHBACK Ollie wakes up in the river, swims frantically to shore, and flashbacks within a flashback to Yao Fei hitting his nerve cluster to bring him back to life, and tucking a map into his clothes before rolling him off the cliff. If we’re supposed to be surprised Ollie wasn’t dead, then the writers are doing something wrong. Ollie finds the map and unfolds it, finding “Shengcun” written in pinyin by a circled section of the island. Ollie’s only mandarin word: “Survive.” END FLASHBACK

Felicity is actually going to be important to the plot! She arranges a meeting with Ollie at the Big Belly Burger and divulges the following things: She’s not an idiot, she knows he’s been lying to her, but she still trusts him. She pulls out Walter’s book and hands it over.

Does it mean anything to Ollie? No, he lies. She goes on to explain that Walter said it belonged to Moira, and Felicity was asked to look into it, then Walter vanished.

The contents of that book, Felicity thinks, got Walter killed.

Good grief. Now all we need is for Felicity to admit she’s known all along that Ollie is the Hood, and the character will be redeemed in my eyes.

Verdict: As a standalone episode, and a showcase for Count Vertigo, this is boring as all get out. But it does do a good job of bringing together plot strands and cashing in earlier plot chips: “Shencun,” Thea’s drug habit, Felicity’s involvement. Such a shame it does it so boringly. And a waste of a good villain.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Why Not to do a PhD

2013-01-29T18:04:33Z

From liv on Dreamwidth:

The gateway into this life is a PhD, and the PhD system is deeply, deeply fucked up when it isn’t actively abusive. Doing a PhD will break you. It’s pretty much designed to break you. Yes, even you, you who are brilliant (that almost goes without saying; it’s because you’re brilliant that you’re contemplating doing a PhD in the first place). You who are resilient and have survived several kinds of shit that life has thrown at you just to get to the point where you’re about to graduate with a brilliant degree. You who have the unconditional support of your family and friends and partners. If you have every admirable personal quality you can think of, if you have every advantage in life, still, getting through a PhD will grind you down, will come terrifyingly close to killing your soul and might well succeed. It will do horrible things to your mental and physical health and test to breaking point every significant relationship in your life.

At this point in reading it, I had to put the computer down and go off and do something else for five minutes, because I had to process my own feelings.

Here’s the thing: The process of doing a PhD (Liv is talking about the UK, and I am talking about the UK) broke me fairly horribly. I went into it a young recent graduate with no masters degree, no work ethic, and also undiagnosed ADHD and an anxiety disorder (probably). I thought I had some sort of depression, but had never seen anyone about it. I still only have self-diagnosed ADHD/Anxiety, but I’m pretty confident about the symptoms right now, and I’m only where I am because I learned coping mechanisms. When I was 23, I didn’t even have the motivation to rein in my wondering mind.

The PhD system in the UK is relatively simple: three years to write a thesis. That is: learn the science, do the research, write it up. Many people take four years, and that’s socially acceptable, but funding only lasts for four years. The funding bodies often provide universities an extra funding pool to support students who are still writing up after three years, but my university (UCL) decided instead to use this money to reward people who completed in three years. In other words: they gave the money to the very students it wasn’t intended for in the first place.

PhD students get supervisors, and mine were amazing and supportive and the best supervisors I could ask for. Given the colleagues I’ve had that have had their supervisors retire, leave the country, or have sexually abused their students, I have nothing to complain about. But they can only ‘supervise’ so much – thesis writing depends on being self-motivated. And I had none of that. I procrastinated most of my first year, and then ran head on into hard, sudden, anxiety. And guess what happens when I’m anxious about something? I procrastinate some more!

I believe I may have had a breakdown around my 4th year, when I was working a job I hated, in a living situation that wasn’t ideal, and dealing with the kind of social situation with my online friends that was designed to hit me in all my social-anxiety weak spots.

A PhD is “supposed” to take 3 years. I took 6.

Do I regret doing it? Not really. I loved the actual data collection. I love dinosaurs and think paleontology is the greatest thing. When I got to grips with the science, it was a rush like – well, let’s just say that the only thing that compares is watching my students get to grips with difficult ideas. I learned, and the learning process is my favorite thing.

But I still advise people to think again before going into a doctorate fresh from an undergraduate or even a masters. And I definitely advise people never to see a PhD as a means to an end. Know yourself. Know your subject, and ibe prepared to make your life your work for as long as it takes.

Maybe warm up by doing something easy first, like writing a novel.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Storytime: W/E 27/01/2013

2013-01-27T14:24:53Z

Books

Life Mask - Emma Donoghue

Currently Reading Alpha - Greg Rucka

Comics
Batwoman #16
Catwoman #16
Saucer Country #11
Stumptown: The Case of the Baby in the Velvet Case #5
Supergirl #16
Young Avengers #1

Manga
Claymore vol. 21

T.V.
Justice League eps 47 "Comfort and Joy" | 48&49 "Wild Cards" | 50-52 "Starcrossed"
Parks and Recreation 2.14 through 3.02
Pride and Prejudice (1995) eps 4,5 & 6
Young Justice: Invasion ep 12 "True Colors"
Arrow 111 "Trust but Verify"
Gaksital 17-19
7th Grade Civil Servant eps 1,2

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries 81 "It's Personal" | 82 "Checks and Balances"
The Lydia Bennet 27 "Heartbreaker" | 28 "Special Two"

My stories were excellent this week, with the exception of two. Can you guess what they were?

This post is also posted at InnerBrat @ Dreamwidth where it has comments. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

The Up-Goer 5 Car for Carrying People Who Make Music

2013-01-26T14:02:16Z

The idea of the meme making the rounds these days is to use the Up-Goer 5 Text editor to describe one’s job, i.e. using the 1,000 most commonly used words in the English Language.

I am a doctor: not the kind of doctor who helps people, but the kind of doctor who knows a great deal about a kind of animal. The animals I know about lived a long time ago, but are all dead now. They are like some flying animals that are living now, but not very like those animals. I studied how these animals walk and run.

After becoming a doctor, I moved to the place I live from a different place, and I studied what I needed to become a teacher. Now I am a doctor and a teacher who talks to children – and sometimes grown-ups – about the world we live in. A lot of the time we talk about different kinds of animals. Sometimes we talk about forces, but most of the time we talk about animals. We talk about the dead animals I am doctor of, but we talk about all the other animals as well: big, small, flying, animals that live on land and animals that live in the water. My children are learning how to tell different kinds of animals from each other.

I am the kind of teacher that thinks class should be fun, and that people learn best when they really want to learn. So I see children after school in places that they decide to go to. I have been a teacher in a school, but I like being a teacher out of school the best of all.

There’s another version that involves describing fandoms in the same way, and it’s ridiculously fun. Maybe another time.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Fanfic: A Complex Problem pt 3

2013-01-25T14:29:16Z

A Complex Problem

Fandom: The Scarlet Pimpernel (Baroness Orczy)

Rating: General Audiences
No Archive Warnings Apply
Category: F/F (genderswap. With secondary M/F)
Characters: Peggy Blakeney, Marguerite St. Just, Armand St. Just, Andrew Ffoulkes, Suzanne de Tournay

A Yuletide gift for croik

Being the part of the story in which I discover I really like trolling my villains.

It was the middle of the afternoon by the time she finally reached Sir Andrew’s London home, and was shown into his presence. Then, they barely had time to greet each other before Marguerite, still the model of composure she had constructed in Richmond, announced calmly:

“Sir Andrew, I would we had time to waste on pleasantries, but I have come here to inform you that your chief, the Scarlet Pimpernel, my sister Peggy St Just, is in the most deadly danger.”

If she had room for even the slightest doubt about Peggy’s identity, it would have been chased away by the way all color and animation disappeared from his countenance at this simple statement. Sir Andrew stood still and pale as marble as he listened to Marguerite’s collected relation of the events of last night. She left out, of course, the particulars of her interaction with Peggy, and the personal revelations she’d run into on that front. Instead she owned, quietly and shamefully but with no loss of clarity, her own betrayal for the sake of her brother, her regrets on that front, and earnestly and passionately, her desire to right this terrible wrong and save both brother and sister-in-law.

His countenance softened as he listened to the pathetic plight that Marguerite laid before him, and as he observed quite how moved she was by the situation. Eventually, with the barest hint of a smile, he bowed his head.

“I see now why Peggy married your brother,” he said.

Before Marguerite could press him for further information, he had dipped a deep bow to her. “I am yours to obey, Mademoiselle.”

Brimming with gratitude, she related her plan to him: they were to meet that night in Dover, making their separate ways to allay suspicion from whichever of Chauvelin’s spies remained in London, and from London society in general. There, with Sir Andrew disguised as a servant to accompany her, and equipped with his knowledge of the Pimpernel’s operations, they would proceed to France to find and warn Peggy. Marguerite harbored no delusions that she would be persuaded to cancel her mission, with those lives that depended on her. But with the warning that Marguerite and Sir Andrew brought her, it was more likely that her brilliant mind would find a way out.

Hope and love were now the forces driving Marguerite forward, all thoughts of despair forced aside by her sureness of purpose. She had an ally, and a plan, and the certainty that came with knowing exactly where she should be and what she had to do. Sitting in her carriage on the road east from London, she had nothing more pressing to do but sit and rest her weary nerves. As the sun disappeared behind her, Marguerite drifted into a soothing sleep, the last image of her mind that of the latent fire burning behind Peggy’s half closed blue eyes.

The meeting with Sir Andrew at Dover brought news of an agonizing delay to their plans. A terrible storm was sweeping in from France, and would preclude their putting out that night. But, he was at pains to point out, Chauvelin would be similarly hindered, were he to try to sail to France. And so, they resigned themselves to spending the night there at The Fisherman’s Rest.

As they waited, Ffloulkes undertook to amuse Marguerite by relating his own history. Sir Andrew was a tall and fair man with a bright, honest face that was unable to conceal the obvious admiration he had for Peggy St Just. His father had been friends with Sir Algernon, and he himself a great favorite of that gentleman when a child. Peggy and Andrew had been fast friends in childhood, before her mother’s illness and her father’s anxiety led the family abroad in search of healthier climates. On Sir Algernon’s return with his daughter, the friendship had been renewed and Andrew – then Sir Andrew – had been taken with the latent passion that burned beneath her studied manners, and the strength of character she’d cultivated in herself.

“She was as a sister to me,” he explained to Marguerite. “And when we met again, I felt that filial bond just as strongly. I would have proposed to her myself, but we knew that was not the nature of the love between us. Of course, I knew of her administration of her father’s estate. Sir Algernon was quite incapacitated with grief even before his wife died. Afterwards, he would surely have lost everything without Peggy’s sense and intelligence.”

Marguerite had been right in her surmise: The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel had been Peggy’s idea alone, conceived as news of the Terror reached her ears, and developed further with Sir Andrew and their other friends, principal among them Lord Tony Dewhurst. Not a single one of those men sworn into the League – nineteen with Armand’s most recent commitment – would think of disobeying a single order given by Peggy, nor of the slightest carelessness regarding her secrecy.

As for his own slip back in London, Sir Andrew had little to say. “Miss Blakeney had little reason to ever take a husband,” he answered Marguerite’s pressing questions. “She is heir to her own father’s title and fortune, and her mission is too important to her to risk a husband interfering with her privacy. Of course, St Just is a brave and noble man, as you must surely know, Mademoiselle, and as devoted to the cause as any of us, but marriage was never a necessity to her. It never crossed any of our minds that she might be compelled to do so by the direction of her heart.”

Marguerite did not dare to ask more – she could not afford to inflate her hopes too much in that regard. Instead, she steered the conversation around again to praises of Peggy’s daring and courage: a subject on which, she was pleased to discover, Sir Andrew delighted in telling.

He recounted for his avid listener the many daring escapades that had been engineered by the resourceful and ingenious Pimpernel, detailing thoroughly every clever move she had made to elude her foes and bring the condemned nobility to safety. He spent a good hour amusing Marguerite with tales of Peggy’s numerous disguises, each more ridiculous than the last. Peggy’s height and long limbs gave her an advantage in passing as a man, and she had an astonishing gift in imitating anybody’s mannerisms and speech, and also of constructing characters so much larger than life that they repelled any further investigation. Including, Marguerite realised, the very character of the foolish Mrs St Just herself!

In rescuing the family de Tournay, for example, she had created the most wicked caricature of an old market woman, with the hair of a dozen executed aristocrats on her whip (donated, Sir Andrew added gaily, from the nineteen men she commanded) and the threat of a plague-ridden grandson in her cart – the very cart in which Suzanne de Tournay hid with her mother and brother!

While on that subject, Sir Andrew’s face took on a wistful aspect, and Marguerite smiled for him. How happy it was, to see a man as deeply in love with a sweet girl as he evidently was. She was grateful, twice over, that he and Peggy had never tried to make a match. Firstly, of course, it freed her to marry Armand and sweep into Marguerite’s life, but Marguerite could not imagine a man more perfectly suited to little Suzanne’s happiness than the gentleman sitting with her now, wiling away the hours with tales of his daring friend.

The wait seemed agonizing, but it had to be borne, and Marguerite spent a restless night taking what sleep she could. It was well into the following day when Sir Andrew brought news that there was a schooner available to charter, and the weather was soon to be acceptable for sailing. The relief was almost overwhelming, but the fresh salt air soon revived her as they embarked for France. Sir Andrew gave her further hope when he told her the tale of a mysterious short man dressed all in black, making similar inquiries as Sir Andrew was searching for a boat. Chauvelin was delayed by the same force that kept them in England. He would be sailing out at the same time.

The trip was short and uneventful, and she felt much more invigorated by being that much closer to her goal. Marguerite wondered, as she walked through Calais, what impenetrable disguise her friend would have adopted to pass unnoticed in this town. Thinking of the many disguises Andrew had described, she found herself longing to see Peggy’s genius at work.

Sir Andrew led her to the Chat Gris – the unremarkable inn that Peggy and her band had frequently used in the past, that her notes to him had let him know she would be using again. There, inquiries of the landlord revealed something unexpected: yes, Peggy was here in town, but as herself! A rich, English lady traveling unchaperoned and conspicuously so, liberal with her purse and brazen with her attitude. So indeed, no one could miss her presence.

Sir Andrew promised to find her, and warn her of Chauvelin’s imminent arrival. He arranged at the inn for Marguerite’s safety, and left her hidden in a dark loft, where she could look down in secrecy on the dining room of the inn. There, no guest could enter or partake of the establishment’s hospitality, without her seeing all. She bade Sir Andrew good luck with his search, and settled in to wait.

Hardly had Marguerite the time to grow accustomed to her cramped quarters when someone was indeed shown into the inn. Two someones, in fact, one of them dressed as a curé, marked by his white collar and broad brimmed hat. Immediately as he started into the room, however, Marguerite recognized his short, insect like frame, his furtive way of moving, and when he looked up to the clock by Marguerite’s hiding hole, she caught the steel look in his dark eyes. It was Chauvelin! Here in Calais and at the very inn to which Peggy was bound to return.

Disguised, no doubt, in order to spring a trap for his enemy, Chauvelin gave orders to his companion, – Desgas, his secretary – about keeping an eye out for “That blasted Pimpernel,” an English stranger in disguise, but gave no further identifying remarks. Neither name nor sex of the prey was mentioned, but Marguerite was sure he must know. Desgas was to return with half a dozen armed guards to this very inn in ten minutes. Six men, and more elsewhere, to catch one woman!

Marguerite’s breath caught in her throat. He was here, and before they were able to warn his prey. On Desgas’ departure, Chauvelin called the innkeeper over and made the same inquiries of him that Andrew had – more demanding, and with the threat of arrest behind him, but with the same result. A fair English lady had been in this inn and was abroad in Calais at this moment. It was clear that he knew for whom he was waiting.

With a confident smirk, Chauvelin sat down and began to eat, sipping frequently from the red wine set before him. All his observer could do, trapped in her loft, was to pray, silently and earnestly, that Peggy would not walk in. For what, with all her brilliance and passion, could she do against the man himself on his own soil? On this shore, he commanded soldiers of the Government. He could have Peggy seized at any moment: could seize her himself, if she were only to show herself. What evil plan he had in store for her there, Marguerite dared not imagine. The only thing that could save Peggy now was her absence.

Waiting, and praying, it seemed to Marguerite that the dreadful thump of her heartbeat must surely betray her to her foe, and begun almost to look on his inevitable discovery of her as a welcome relief from the pain of waiting — until her ear was caught by a sound from outside.

She glanced quickly to Chauvelin. Had he heard it? She hoped he had not, that it would pass by without notice, but no, his head lifted and his glass returned to the table, and she knew he had caught it to. Who could miss it?

Outside, approaching the inn, was the clear, bright sound of a woman singing God Save the King.

The voice stopped outside the inn, as they both knew it would, and the door handle began to turn. Marguerite longed at that second to fly from her hiding place and scream for Peggy to turn around, but she clenched her hands until her knuckles turned white and stayed in place. Chauvelin had stiffened in his chair, and stared at the door with an expression of bloodthirsty delight that chilled Marguerite to her heart, thinking of the fair lady it was directed towards. Then, before the door could open, he turned away, keeping his face turned towards his meal.

Peggy swept into the inn, and what a picture she looked against the dirt of her surroundings! Every inch the fashion plate, she was exquisite in a spotless white dress, over which she had selected the most striking crimson redingote, with a matching hat perched firmly on her yellow hair. Marguerite could see, with eyes recently opened to Peggy’s true character, through every studied inanity and silliness, to the passion and nobility that smoldered beneath those blue eyes. It was obvious, in this moment, how the lady had persuaded nineteen proud English gentlemen to follow her like a Queen, and how thorough the charade that hid this woman from the world. Peggy’s song had not stopped, only paused while she worked the door, and now it revived with carefree jollity when inside.

Her gaze swept the room, and for a heartbeat Marguerite was convinced those pretty blue eyes alighted on the black curtain that shielded her loft from view. No sooner had they glanced in that direction, however, did they move on and Marguerite’s brief hope died, because then Peggy was looking at the figure in front of her, still hunched over his food in mimicry of dining. She laughed out loud at his appearance.

“I declare, is that Citizen Chaubertin I see in front of me?”

That gentleman looked up, and a flash of anger crossed his face; whether at being recognized or at having his name misspoken, Marguerite could not tell. It vanished quickly, and was replaced by a slow, greasy smile.

“Chauvelin, Madame St Just.”

“Beg pardon, I am so stupid with names. And whatever brings you to this charming town?” Peggy prattled on indifferently. “I could have sworn I saw you in London just two days ago.”

“A man’s business, Madame, may call him to many places very suddenly. I would be more interested by your presence on this shore. It is hardly the favorite leisure destination for London’s fashionable set.” As he talked, Chauvelin brought out his snuff box, fidgeting with that and finally taking a sniff when he had finished his speech.

“And is it business that causes you to dress like that?” Peggy said, ignoring his implied question. “Lud, Citizen, have you taken orders, now? I would hardly have thought it of you.”

She had taken a seat now, on the opposite side of the table from Chauvelin, her ungainly legs sprawled out in front of her so that her riding boots were well clear of the hems of her skirts. Her eyes touched on the wine bottle and looked back at him, until he had finished with his snuff and obliged by pouring her a glass.

“A harmless charade, nothing more, Madame St Just. I’m sure you have conducted many of your own in time.”

“Oh no, man – that’s enough wine, thank you ever so much – if I were to adopt a disguise, you can be assured it would be much more thorough than that. Why, I knew you straight away. Perhaps with some powder – ”

She leaned forward, across the table, steadying herself with one hand over his snuff box, while the other whipped away his hat to get a better look at his face.

“…but no, I fear there really would be nothing you can do about that nose.”

She seemed so idle in offering what appeared to be well placed advice that Marguerite would have laughed out loud, were she not frozen where she lay. As if to prove that her insult was meant with the best of intentions, Peggy let out one of those loud snorts that she was so famed for in London, and sat back.

“But perhaps the disguise is not meant for me, what? Perhaps it is to waylay suspicions while you focus your pursuit of me in secret….” there was no response, although Chauvelin had stilled where he sat “…good lord, Citizen! Don’t you know I am happily married!” She placed a hand over her breast in honest seeming shock, and gasped – before dissolving into that braying laugh of hers.

Chauvelin was white with fury at these insinuations from the Englishwoman, but Marguerite could see that he also appeared impotent in that rage. He rose from his chair, an action that did not quite hide the furtive glance he gave to the clock, which he otherwise could not see without turning in his chair. He picked up his hat, which Peggy had so carelessly swept on to the table.

“Happily married, indeed! And where is your husband, Madame?”

“Why, here in France, of course!” she declared lightly. “La, but you have not finished your meat. Would you mind terribly, monsieur? Dreadfully forward, I know.”

“By all means,” Chauvelin conceded, with a sarcastic bow.

For one dreadful moment, Marguerite feared the food might be poisoned – but had she not just seen Chauvelin himself partaking of that same dish? She bit her tongue, especially as her enemy had drawn close to her now, using the mirror on the wall to adjust his hat, and also to inspect his nose for the truth of Peggy’s careless insult.

“What was I saying?” The lady was saying, pausing only to fetch the pepperpot and apply the contents liberally to her food. “Demmed French food, all blood and no bite – oh yes! What possible reason would a married woman have for coming to this dreary country but to meet her husband? Beg your pardon, Chauvelin, of course you cannot help being French.”

Chauvelin gave another predatory smile and touched the brim of his now secured hat. “Indeed I cannot, Madame. And you and your husband will to Paris, I assume?”

“Oh no, man. Lille, only.” Peggy was too engrossed in her food to notice the man circling the table as a wolf, until he was nearly standing over her foot “Dangerous place now, Paris, is it not? I’m sure I do not care to visit it this year at least.”

She finished what he had left of his plate in a few hungry bites before cleaning her mouth and hands with a serviette and looking up at him with a lazy smile.

“Lud, monsieur, what are you at?” she asked casually. “You are standing so close I can hardly move. Step back, won’t you?”

With an inclination of his head, Chauvelin did, allowing Peggy room to stand up. At her full height, she stood a head taller than him. It presented an amusing tableau, the tall elegant lady looking down lazily at the tense, coiled man, him squinting up at her with poorly restrained hatred. She hardly seemed to notice it.
To Marguerite’s watching eye, Peggy seemed the tallest she ever had, an Amazon standing over her enemy. There was something regal about her in that moment, and Marguerite realized that it was because Peggy never usually straightened her posture, stood to her full height. When she did now, she towered over the man. Any intimidation he’d thought of using over the woman was completely lost in her casual stretch and the way she smiled indulgently down at him. It forced him to take a step back, as he did so looking nervously at the clock; a look which caused Peggy to do the same.

“Lud, citizen!” she declared. “you will keep glancing to that clock. What, are you worried that someone is hiding in it? With a sword, perhaps, determined to run you through?”

It was testament to Chauvelin’s stretched nerves that he jumped and turned to the clock in alarm, at which sight Peggy only laughed. “Good lord, man! No one could hide in a clock that size! Are you mad? But I see you are looking for your snuff,” – for now Chauvelin was patting down his clothing anxiously. “Do you not see it is on the table where you left it.”

So it was, although its presence was greeted with some suspicion. Had it been there when he stood, took his hat, and watched his meal taken by Peggy? But now the small silver box was indeed waiting for him on the table, and he snatched it up, glancing at the lady with a curious look of triumph, for at this moment, they could hear the careful measured steps of a band of trained soldiers. The men sent for, coming to arrest poor Peggy while she merely amused herself picking at Chauvelin’s patience.

He smiled that smile of triumph, and took a pinch of snuff.

He had no way to know, that in Peggy’s lazy impudence, she had stolen his box from the table as he poured her wine, and filled it with pepper as she ate! The convulsive sneezing that seized him was all-consuming; doubled over, he had no way of seeing, let alone preventing, Peggy St Just from calmly turning on her heel, and slipping out of the room.

Chauvelin’s men burst in while he was still in the throes of the sneezing fit, and had to wait until he had enough composure to stammer out:

“The woman! The English woman! Did you see her? Stop her!”

There was a heavy pause in which Desgas met the questioning glances of the soldiers before turning back to his master.

“The… woman?”

But Chauvelin had no time for their contempt at his letting a mere woman escape. He raged at them, and Desgas eventually admitted he had heard talk of a tall English lady having a conversation with a local merchant, contriving to hire him and his cart for a journey to a hut, belonging to a man known as ‘Pere Blanchard.’ Now they knew the rendezvous point for Peggy and Armand, and could close the net on both of them! Chauvelin sent his soldiers on to scout the road for the cart bearing the Scarlet Pimpernel. One soldier attempted a joke about searching for a woman, but he was silenced quickly.

——————

It was agony for Marguerite. She watched from her hiding place as Chauvelin paced the inn, sending Desgas out on errands to find out as much information about the cart as possible. Desgas returned with another carter, who was familiar with the area and had witnessed Peggy herself making the transaction. Chauvelin employed the man to lead the way to the hut, and carry Chauvelin himself to the meeting place. Desgas was to find a full unit of soldiers and follow behind.

As Chauvelin left the inn, heading out of town, Marguerite knew she had follow him. Just to see Peggy, just to warn her once, to fight with the last of her own breath to save her beloved, was all Marguerite could think of.

The night was dark and cold, and she pulled her wrap tight around her as she followed the party at as safe a distance as she could put between them. The wind was picking up as she left, and the cloud cover was complete, threatening rain at anytime. But the howling winds at least covered her steps on the edge of the road, which she kept as quiet and as small as possible, to protect her from backwards turning eyes. She followed the road carefully, her feet slipping in the mud, in shoes that were the height of fashion in London, but were completely unsuitable for walking for any length of time. Her skirts tore in the bracken, and she shivered in the cold, but she kept her heart firmly on the destination: on seeing Peggy again.

After over an hour of walking, the cart bearing Chauvelin was met by his soldiers, galloping in the opposite direction. There Captain reported that they had seen no evidence of this English Lady, for whose existence they had only Chauvelin’s word and the word of the merchant to believe. However, they had found the hut they were sure was the rendezvous. There, they had from a distance, seen two men that fit the descriptions of both Armand and the Comte de Tournay, and heard enough of their conversation to know they were waiting for the Pimpernel.

The Captain made a point, in relating what he had heard, that Armand St Just referred to his leader as il and not elle. Chauvelin dismissed that point angrily.

They had left soldiers guarding that hut from any new arrivals, and come back to report to Chauvelin and receive further orders. He delighted. Marguerite, hearing all this, despaired. Peggy could not hope to escape, now. She would arrive at the hut only to have the soldiers close in on her, and all would be lost. Unless somehow – God knew how! – Marguerite could possibly warn her in time.

She felt that hope slipping away from her. Now all she could hope for would be to tell Peggy how she felt, to finally push both their fears aside and spend the last moments of her life with the woman she loved, for that love was now no more dangerous than the situation they were in.

Marguerite’s body ached from fatigue, and her feet throbbed in pain, but she kept on in the mud. It amounted to nearly two hours’ total effort on that road before they reached their destination: a tiny, run-down fisherman’s hut on a cliff overlooking a rocky beach. She found herself the best hiding place she could, and listened to Chauvelin giving further orders to his men to form a perimeter around the hut, through which no person could pass without notice.

He ordered them to be as silent as possible not only to avoid the notice of the men within, but to prevent anyone of any stripe from entering the hut. The carter, who had led them this far by the promise of payment, was threatened, terrorized and tightly bound to prevent escape or warning of their victims. Once Peggy arrived, then they could close in and capture her, and the men inside waiting for relief. In the meanwhile, all anyone could do was wait.

Marguerite sagged in the mud, ready to give in to despair. Her shoes had pinched her feet into agony, and she took them off, exposing torn stockings to the cold air and affording herself a brief respite. How she envied Peggy’s riding boots at that moment! She had come wholly unsuited for the exertion. But in her stockinged feet she could move noiselessly around the hedge on the side of the road towards the beach and the hut to find a better view of the situation, scrambling for the hope that there could be something she could do, some way of ending this torturous wait.

As she cleared her view of the beach she saw her: A schooner sitting quietly on the water, not three miles from the hut, clean white sails set and ghost-like in what moonlight was pushing through the clouds. The Day Dream, Peggy’s favorite yacht, waiting for a master and mistress who would never reach her.

She froze and sank down again now that she had closed a small distance towards the hut and the soldiers, moving inland slightly to put herself away from the Day Dream and any glances turned that way. Marguerite could once again hear Chauvelin talking to his men. They too, had seen and recognized the ship, and were on alert again. They had scouted the hut and discovered four men inside; Armand, de Tournay, and two others Marguerite could not identify, all waiting for the Scarlet Pimpernel and release. But the plan, as Chauvelin gave it, did not change. They waited in the dark for her fated appearance.

Oh, Peggy! Where could she be? Marguerite could feel the treacherous hope rising that perhaps Peggy had indeed been warned off by her encounter with Chauvelin at the Chat Gris. Perhaps she had turned around and sought safety for herself.

No. No, this was impossible, Marguerite knew. She understood enough of Peggy’s character now to know the how inconceivable it would be to her to would abandon her husband and the men she had sworn to rescue. And where would she go without the Day Dream?

Marguerite could feel her senses numbing in the cold, and the inevitability of despair as she waited for some relief from the wait. She pinched her arm to keep herself alert and strained to listen for any sign of Peggy. She had been waiting there for half an hour when she heard the faintest sound from the beach – the weight of a person on pebbles! Marguerite almost cried out, and had to bite down on her lip to prevent her from doing so.

There, crouching on the beach, picking their way as quietly as possible to the shore, were four men – Armand and the Comte de Tournay among them. And waiting for them in the surf, a small dinghy with a single man at the oars. They were making their way to safety! It had been the Comte’s careless foot on the rocks that had made the noise, and Armand turned around to see if anyone had looked over.

His eyes met Marguerite’s and he froze in shock.

Their eyes met, and even in the dark, the brother and sister could communicate the faintest understanding between them. Armand had been in the middle of executing a planned escape, but he had not expected to see her there, and now all his plans were thrown into uncertainty. He dropped back from the party and beckoned desperately at her. They had to leave!

But Chauvelin was between Marguerite and the beach. If Marguerite tried to approach him, they would find her, and find Armand escaping, and all would be for naught. And if Armand delayed much longer, their eyes would turn that way naturally and he would be seen.

She shook her head furiously and turned her back on him, scrambling up the grassy slope away from the beach. It took an effort to put her sore feet down heavily, but she carefully made just enough noise to counter the men creeping on the beach. She even relaxed her steady control of her breath, letting it come in gasps from her heightened tension.

A hand closed tightly on her skirt, then on her ankle, and pulled her down. Marguerite landed in the mud, and turned around to look Chauvelin right in the eye. Beyond his triumphant face, she could see Armand turning helplessly and completing his journey to the boat.

She was now Chauvelin’s prisoner. But Armand, with enough sense not to put the men he was rescuing in danger for the sake of his sister, was making his escape. Now the only lives to be lost were Peggy’s and her own, and if any life had to be lost alongside, or exchanged for, the woman she valued most highly, Marguerite now had the power to make it hers.

Chauvelin did not pass up the opportunity to gloat over her. Immediately, someone mockingly asked if this was the lady they were waiting for. His master did not even mind the remark.

“No, my friend. This is someone else.”

For now he had Peggy St Just’s sister-in-law – the sister of the man he believed to still be in the hut waiting for relief. All Chauvelin could see in his greed for victory was an innocent woman he could use in his complex game to capture the woman he hated so much. Did he suspect what Peggy meant to her? Marguerite did not think that, but he did have a trophy now.

She was bound and tied, and he threatened to gag her, but changed his mind at the opportunity to torture her further. Instead, he silenced her with the threat that the slightest attempt to warn her brother or his wife would be met with the execution of every last person in the hut.

Marguerite shivered in the cold, and met Chauvelin’s eyes with her own wide and round, letting him think she was shaking in fear. Armand was safe, but Peggy – where was she? And now Marguerite was caught, could she hope to see her again?

Confident that Marguerite could not escape and would not betray her brother, Chauvelin let her lie, bound and miserable in the mud. She could hardly feel the force of her bonds, in the cold and her fatigue. But the relief of having seen Armand allowed her to succumb finally to exhaustion. She swooned where she lay, dropping out of consciousness.

It was in this swoon that she heard it, and thought it might be a dream. Peggy’s clear and solid voice singing God Save the King, carried on the wind so that no one could be quite certain in which direction or for how far it carried. The sound of the men stirring was what brought Marguerite into full awareness. They had heard it too.

It was Marguerite’s chance. She squirmed in the mud against her bonds, and screamed, clearly into the night.

“Armand! Armand, my brother! Fire! Your leader is here! He is betrayed! Fire, Armand!”

She was sure there was no hiding the sex of Peggy’s voice, but she was not going to name her now. Not when she had seen the disdain Chauvelin had met. Let every one but himself believe the Pimpernel a man. Maybe she could still escape with Peggy if that were the case. She screamed and she screamed with the very last of her energy, and fell back down, quite faint again.

The singing was silenced as soon as Marguerite’s screams rang out, but the air was soon filled with male shouts and curses, and the heavy tread of boots as Chauvelin ordered them into the hut to fulfill his threat. The curses were louder when they found it empty, the men disappeared.

He turned angrily to the Captain of his men, demanding to know why he had been disobeyed, only to be reminded that his orders were to let no one enter the hut, and had not mentioned the possibility of people leaving.

She bit back a smile and stayed quiet as she listened to events, keeping her face the perfect mask of surprise. She listened, as the soldiers found a note in the hut, bearing the signature of a hastily drawn five petalled flower, and telling of her presence in a certain creek back near Calais. The boat, she directed, was to meet her there.

“St. Just is lost, but the Pimpernel shall be ours!” Chauvelin declared. He found among his men someone who was sure of the way that they would be at the identified location before the boat had time to make the trip. Chauvelin had victory within his sight, but he still suffered from the loss of St Just and de Tournay, and needed to vent his frustration. The wretched carter, who lay bound firmer than Marguerite and gagged, became the object for this. He was tied and beaten so his howls of pain echoed across the bay, before Chauvelin and his soldiers hastened away.

They abandoned Marguerite on the rocky shore. She still missed her shoes and she was too exhausted physically and emotionally to move at all. Maybe they thought her unconscious; she did not care.

She had been so hopeful for a second, but Peggy was still to be hunted down by her enemies, still not safe. And Marguerite was now unable to reach her. In the silence left by the departing soldiers, she wept.

———————–

“Damn!”

The curse rang out clear, and bright, completely British and completely womanly. Marguerite gasped quietly, still choking on tears that prevented her from matching the curse for volume.

The voice continued:

“Lud, but I wish they hadn’t been quite so brutish. I will have to wear shawls for weeks!”

Finally, Marguerite found her voice. “Peggy! Oh dearest, won’t you show yourself?”

“It’s all very well asking me that, dear, but I’m trussed up here quite firmly. I’m afraid if you want to see me, you shall have to make the distance yourself.

It was the carter! Tied and beaten by Chauvelin out of nothing more than spite for not catching Peggy. How Marguerite would love to see their faces had they known! She scrambled to her feet, then fell again as her bleeding soles failed to take her weight, crawling desperately across the pebbles to where, she now saw, Peggy had adopted the most perfect disguise of a man, and had borne through a man’s shirt the pain and humiliation of a beating.

“Peggy,” she said, as she reached her, “Oh Peggy cherie, what have they done to you?”

She collapsed by Peggy’s side, laying her hands gently on the back of the shirt, and was almost horrified to see Peggy wince away from her touch.

“Nothing I wouldn’t take again, dear. But would you… my hands.”

Her hands and legs had indeed been tied quite firmly to the rock, and Marguerite worked with nails and teeth to get them undone, crying all the time with sympathy and with relief, and not in small part with her own fatigue as well. All the time, Peggy muttered soothing words in that affected drawl of hers.

“Hush, now. Hush, my Margot. It’s not as bad as all that.”

When she was untied, Peggy found the jacket she had worn as a man, and draped it gently around Marguerite’s shoulders, neither of them even trying to stand. Marguerite sat there as the woman she had betrayed so carelessly gently smoothed the woolen coat over her shoulders, looking down at her work rather than up at Marguerite. Then she stopped.

With her arms still on Marguerite’s, in the act of dressing her, Peggy’s head swayed, and in a swoon she dropped it down on Marguerite’s shoulder.

“Oh Peggy!” Marguerite cried, easing the fainted woman off her shoulder and laying her down in her own lap. The jacket was weighted curiously, and an inspection of the pockets produced a flask of brandy, which she gently touched to Peggy’s lips.

Peggy stirred and blinked up in the darkness at Marguerite,. She smiled, and lifted a heavy hand to take Marguerite’s own.

“My darling nurse,” she said. “Where would I be without you?”

“Oh!” Marguerite, who had been overjoyed to see Peggy’s eyes open, now looked away in shame. “Oh Peggy, if only you knew.”

“Lud! That thing at the ball?” Peggy pushed herself up onto her elbows, unable to sit quite yet, but determined to keep her back off the rocks. “I knew, Margot. A trifling thing, long since forgiven, now quite forgotten.”

“But…”

“Now hush.” Peggy, with great effort, brought herself to sit. “My Margot, you are forgetting that you saved my life tonight. For if I had not been forewarned by Sir Andrew of Chauvelin’s presence in Calais, I would have walked straight into his trap.”

“Sir Andrew – he found you?”

“He found me and told me you were waiting for me, precious. Something he would never do if you had not brought him here. Sterling chap, all the way. Obeys every single one of my orders, of course. But when my orders were to stay home, it took you to take charge. My life is yours, my dear.”

Peggy explained the rest of the plot; how she had colluded with the men inside to have them sneak out quietly and board the boat while she waited out. How she had slipped Armand a false note to leave for Chauvelin, sending him on a wild goose chase, and how all they had to do now was wait for Ffoulkes himself, to bring them to a smaller dinghy and then to the Day Dream.

Marguerite could not help herself at that point, she threw her arms around Peggy and covered her cheek with kisses. It was Peggy who interrupted her, taking both Marguerite’s tiny hands in her own and bringing them down between the ladies. Her indifferent air was all gone, her affected laziness failing to completely hide an intense passion burning behind them.

“You saved my life, Margot,” she said again. “My dearest, Margot. How could I not have seen how noble, and brave you are?”

“Brave, me? Peggy -”

“No, you are brave,” Peggy said, her voice steady, but her inanity not quite holding up. “For did you not come here with nothing but the wind under your feet to carry you? And I – who commands a band of men like a general – I am afraid.”

“Hush.” Now it was Marguerite’s turn to sooth the other. “Do not be afraid, chere. Do not! I am at your side, now. And will never leave it, if you will -”

The rest of her sentence was lost, for Peggy drew Marguerite to her then, and closed her mouth over Marguerite’s own.

After that first, long, sweet kiss, Marguerite sighed and heard Peggy do the same, before they looked each other in the eyes. Everything else they would want to say was communicated then, without words.
They sat, then, as lovers on the rocky beach, with Marguerite eventually laying her head on Peggy’s shoulder. Their fingers entwined with each other, now on Peggy’s knee, now on Marguerite’s, it mattered not. Together, they watched the Eastern sky grow silver, until the sound of a foot on the pebbles tore Marguerite out of her reverie.

“Someone is coming!” The last half hour had done a little to soothe her nerves, but she still startled, while Peggy smiled and smoothed out Marguerite’s auburn hair from her face.

“Of course,” she said. “It is only Sir Andrew. What ho, Ffoulkes!”

That gentleman had seen them now, and he touched his hand to his hat as he approached.

“My ladies,” he said, with a gallant bow. “Your brother and husband await you on the Day Dream, as you ordered, Mrs St Just.”

“Everyone got out without a hitch?”

“As smooth as ever.”

“Good show.”

Still dressed as a carter, Peggy stood slowly, picking a strand of auburn hair from her shirt as naturally as a man adjusting his cravat. The only concession to the terrible beating she had taken was in the softest groan as she straightened her back.

“Oh, Sir Andrew. I’m afraid my sister has done herself a terrible injury to her feet. Carry her to the boat, won’t you?”

Marguerite put her hands up genteelly and Andrew scooped her up in his arms. Peggy stood by his side, leaning on him slightly, but her hand soon found Marguerite’s fingers, and she pressed them gently.

“La, sir,” Marguerite teased. “Carrying another lady like a bride. What would darling Suzanne say?”

“She would say,” he replied, steadily, “that I am a noble and chivalrous man, and a worthy member of the League.”

“Have you made your case to her father yet, Andrew?” Peggy inquired lazily.

“I have been in the man’s acquaintance for little more than an hour, my lady,” he replied, with a familiar smile. “I thought it might wait.”

“Until we put shore in England, then, but not a moment before,” she replied. “You must never lose hold of your love once you’ve found her.”

“Is that an order, my captain?”

Peggy squeezed Marguerite’s hand again. “Yes, sir. It is.”

———————–

What more is there to say? In Armand’s cabin on the Day Dream, the ladies clung to each other like they were afraid to be parted, and Armand, as master of the vessel, was able to give them the privacy they needed. He and Andrew talked, on that voyage; and an arrangement was made, a vow to secrecy implied, and silent approval given of the happiness of the women, one a sister, and one as good as to her dearest friend.

Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, as good as his word, wasted no time at all in securing the approval of the Comte de Tournay, but his happiness would have to be delayed by a few weeks following the loss of Sir Algernon, who had been as an uncle to him. Sir Algernon was succeeded by Dame Peggy St Just, and she and her husband, it was said, had as happy a marriage as any of the more passionate couples in England.

Marguerite St Just continued to live with her brother and his wife on their Richmond estate, and for many years retained her title as the darling of English society. She never took a husband, and in doing so, kept many a heart aching.

As for Chauvelin: his claims that the Scarlet Pimpernel was a woman were met with incredulity by his masters, and ridicule by his men, and after a while he ceased to repeat them. He was never invited back to England.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Debi Watches Arrow (sydht!) 1.10: Trust but Verify

2013-01-25T01:59:48Z

IT’S A DIGGLE-CENTRIC EPISODE.

Diggle remains close enough to being awesome that it excites me, but still doesn’t quite manage to make past “whatever Ollie tells me too.” But there is some insight into his character that might explain this, maybe, if I let go of what Diggle might be and start looking at the character as written? Maybe?

The good news is, I don’t have much to say in the “Ollie’s Got Issues” section, because he’s actually playing secondary character to all the more interesting plots. Which is good and how it should be, and actually makes this episode much better! In fact, the only part of that subplot is the Island of Low Saturation.

Theme of the Week: Seeing the best in people, naivete vs cynicism. Or: Why Laurel and Diggle are better than everyone.

Villain of the Week

We open on the robbery of an armored truck: a man in black clothes, military boots and a whole heck of a lot of weapons, steps out in front of a money truck, leveling a grenade launcher at them. Then a van pulls up behind the stopped vehicle and similarly clad bad guys pour out. The grenade launcher fires a pellet of gas into the truck, expelling the guards, and the money is acquired from the back.

Ollie catches news of the robbery (which is the latest in a series) on the news, and goes over to the Arrow Cave to investigate it and get in some one armed topless pushups. When Diggle finally rolls into work with coffee, he actually calls it “The Arrow Cave,” and I am vindicated.

Note to Non-Comics Readers: Yes, in comics it is actually called the Arrow Cave. And you thought I was riffing on the Batcave.

Anyway, the reason Ollie investigated the technique is that the CCTV footage on the news had looked familiar, and he was able to compare it to an identical MO employed by the Marines in Afghanistan in 2009, to take out a taliban transport vehicle. Diggle agrees the techniques are exactly the same and would like to know please, where Ollie found this Afghanistan footage?

Turns out Ollie’s been investigating someone: Ted Gaynor, currently working for private security firm Blackhawk Squad Protection Group.

BLACKHAWK BLACKHAWK BLACKHAWK

NNCR: The Blackhawk Squadron are a team of crack fighter pilots assembled in WWII from a range of different Allied countries, including some occupied territories. Later in DC history, Blackhawk Airways appears as a private aviation company. Ted Gaynor served briefly with the Blackhawks, but was kicked out for being too militaristic. Later he reappeared as an ally of the Blackhawk’s biggest nemesis, Killer Shark.

(Killer Shark is not actually a shark, and therefore isn’t to be confused with King Shark, who is a shark.)

In Arrow-universe, Ted Gaynor was Diggle’s commanding officer on his first tour. He is also on THE LIST.

Diggle ain’t buying it. Gaynor is not rich, and he saved Diggle’s life, and Diggle refuses to accept the Book or the tactical similarities and believe that he might be a highwayman. They’ve been in contact since returning – Diggle was even offered a job at Blackhawk six months ago. Ollie counters with further evidence – Gaynor’s training specialty was the exact sort of grenade launcher used in the heists.

Blah blah Diggle and Ollie fight about whether THE LIST is important now that they know it’s all the Squiggle Organization and the Other Archer and stuff, and I have to accept that even though Diggle has every reason to deny the evidence and stand by his senior officer, and that loyalty makes people change their minds, it’s perhaps time to accept that the general inconsistency that the writers exhibit in Diggle’s lines as turned the character into a textual hypocrite.

Not as big a hypocrite as Ollie, of course. But every episode Diggle takes whatever argument that counters Ollie, and Ollie is Always Right, so of course, Diggle has to be Always Wrong. And you know? Diggle’s loyalty to Gaynor is ENTIRELY UNDERSTANDABLE in the context of just this episode, but it’s meaningless, because last week he was all “the list is the best thing!” because the writers needed him to say it to Ollie.

…I got distracted there. didn’t I?

“I understand if you want to take the week off,” says Ollie.

“No thank you,” Diggle replies, and adds meaningfully, “sir,” and on that line I understand Diggle so much more, because he’s a soldier, not a bodyguard, and he has this super strong unwaivering loyalty and somehow he cast Ollie into the role of “commanding officer” rather than “partner” and THAT’S why he takes so much of Ollie’s crap and I do wish he wouldn’t.

But I am a crazy sucker for ridiculously loyal characters.

Ollie tells Diggle that he’s planned to have a “pointed conversation” with Mr. Gaynor that night. See what he did there? Point? Arrowhead? Geddit? Ollie’s a funny man, is what I’m saying.

Anyway, off he goes to Blackhawk HQ, where he interrupts Gaynor in the middle of downloading some files onto a flash drive. But then that “pointed conversation,” (haha I’m still laughing) is interrupted by the arrival of Diggle, who turns out to be actually a competent bodyguard when he’s not working for Ollie. Maninnahood contents himself with shooting an arrow into a computer monitor and making off with the flash drive (that was convenient.)

Diggle stays behind and asks Gaynor why he might be a target for Maninnahood. Gaynor is evasive and asks Diggle what he thinks, which is a pretty good non-answer. The upshot is, Diggle is offered a job.

In the ArrowCave, Ollie and Diggle have their tiff of the week about why Ollie trusts Diggle less than the List, or rather, than his father, because “a few years ago I found a message [Robert] left me, explaining the List.” Turns out, Ollie didn’t exactly spend the entire five years on the island. DUN DUN DUN. Anyway, fight aside, Diggle is now working for Blackhawk, so he can find out either way.

Diggle takes Gaynor out to Big Belly Burger to catch up and gossip. Carly delivers food to Gaynor, but not Diggle, because she’s policing Diggle’s food intake and he’s okay with that. Gaynor decides that this is flirting, sister-in-law or not.

Eeeeeeeeeeeh show how come you like people moving in on their best friend/brother’s widows so much? Can’t Diggs and Carly have platonic awesomeness? NO, apparently.

They are interrupted by the arrival of another member of Blackhawk, Paul Knox. He was also in Afghanistan, and Diggle doesn’t like him one bit, for reasons Gaynor understands. “People change, John. And everyone deserves the chance to prove it.” Knox gives him a line about keeping him off the street, and if Knox hadn’t got a job here, he’d be out being an armed criminal.

Ollie is unable to crack the encryption on the flash drive, so he goes to Felicity Smoak, telling her it’s for a scavenger hunt being run by a friend of his, where the prize is a case of Lafite Rothschilde, and if she can crack the key, he’ll give her a bottle. Felicity’s all “this is military grade security, the rich are weird” and starts looking at Ollie barfingly longingly. Then she cracks the key and discovered all the schematics and plans for hitting all the armored car carriers in the city. She phones Ollie and suggests going to the police, but he asks her to send them to him instead, so he can go to the police and she keeps her nose clean.

Ugh, Felicity, why are you so ridiculously gullible?

Heist time! Another armored car is being held up, but they are interrupted by Maninnahood, who takes on machine guns with a bow and arrows because of previously established bow > guns set up. He shoots the grenade launcher guy’s mask off, then hits him in the collar, before being forced to retreat to a pile of trash. The robbers stop to haul their wounded into their truck (Labelled “Inter Globe Cable”), and drive off.

NNCR: The injured man is called “Blake” – a nod to Zinda Blake, Lady Blackhawk, who feel through a time portal from the 1940s to the ‘modern day,’ and became personal pilot and transport specialist for the Birds of Prey – Black Canary’s team.

At the Party of the Week, Ollie confers with Diggle. Grenade launcher guy wasn’t Gaynor, and Gaynor was with Diggle the whole time. Diggs tells Ollie about Knox, and Ollie tells Diggs about shooting the guy, so Diggs goes off to investigate the trucks for blood they can trace for Knox.

If they’d stopped to trade physical descriptions, this wouldn’t be necessary, as Blake and Knox are visibly different races.

Before Diggs leaves, Ollie VERY UNSUBTLY plants a bug on him. Diggs even watches him. It’s kind of adorable.

Diggle goes to the Blackhawk garage and starts investigating vans. Finding blood in one, he checks the side and discovers that the Blackhawk logo peels off to reveal a “Inter Globe Cable” one underneath. This discovery turns up just as Knox arrives with gun. He knew Diggs was trouble because of Felicity successfully hacking just as Diggle signed up. Knox takes Diggle prisoner just as DUN DUN DUN Gaynor walks in!

Gaynor’s the man in charge! “My men, my mission.” His motivation, as he monologues to Diggle, is… um, that the army made him power mad? I’m not sure on this one. Anyway, after Blake being shot, he’s down a grenade launcher dude – even though Gaynor himself wasn’t at the last one, so really that means they have JUST ENOUGH people, not down a man. But then he wouldn’t have an excuse to TAKE CARLY HOSTAGE to blackmail Diggle into helping them.

Sigh.

But at the party, Ollie is hearing all this, so off he goes!

Heist time! The bad guys and Carly sit in the truck, and Diggle steps out into the road with his grenade launcher. The armored car approaches… and Diggle stands down, letting him pass. Obviously, this makes a lot of people very angry, but what the Blackhawks have forgotten, is that DIGGLE IS HOLDING A GRENADE LAUNCHER, BITCHES.

Oh yeah.

Grenade in the ground produces enough shock and smoke for Carly to escape, and Diggle picks up a dropped gun and pursues the fleeing Gaynor. Knox gets up, and picks up a sniper rifle to shoot Diggle down, but he is interrupted by Maninnahood. Fight fight fight!

Carly runs, Gaynor chases her, and Diggle chases him. He catches up, and threatens Gaynor with a gun, but Gaynor calls his bluff. Diggle still can’t shoot his ex-commanding officer.

Fortunately, Ollie has just finished with Knox and comes around the corner in time to shoot Gaynor in the chest with an arrow.

I had – rather thought that Ollie’s character development over the last few episodes had been away from “Punisher with a bow.” GUESS NOT. I don’t suppose Ollie’s never going to give a ‘killing is wrong’ speech again? No? Thought not.

“You’re late,” Diggle says to Ollie. Because he knew about the bug, dude. That was ridiculously unsubtle. “I wish you trusted me, though.”

“I trusted you,” says Ollie. “But them? Never.”

COMMUNICATION, GENTLEMEN. I can’t imagine “so go investigate inside but I’ma give you a bug to wear so I can cavalry in, okay?” would have been met with a negative. Unless the writers were being tools.

Ollie flees, Carly comes back, and Diggle checks she’s okay before the police come onto the scene. They are happy with the first round of questioning, apparently, because Diggle returns to the Arrow Cave to debrief with Ollie (and not to check on Carly and her son, who I guess are fine dealing with it on their own?)

“I screwed up,” says Diggle. I don’t know what version of events he’s thinking of, but he didn’t do anything wrong. He went undercover, he discovered proof of their activities, and he got to the bad guys in a way Ollie couldn’t. But no, Diggle isn’t the White Hero, so he has to be in the wrong. Blegh.

OTOH, Ollie also admits he was wrong to trust the List over Diggle. Because he chose Diggle to be his partner for a reason.

Because Diggle had more or less figured it out and it was getting to be a pain hiding from him

Because Diggle “sees the best in people.”

Ollie lets Diggle cross out Gaynor’s name, and for some reason that isn’t obvious to me, Diggle says that he doesn’t want to know about the rest of the names until Ollie chooses to tell him.

Eeeeeh I don’t know.

The Island of Low Saturation

Dressed in the dead man’s gear, carrying the dead man’s gun and using the dead man’s map, Ollie finds Fyers’ base camp. Pulling his balaclava over his face, he walks in and joins the line for foods. Everyone has their balaclava down, so he fits right in. He is joined by another man, who instantly pegs Ollie as new. All we can tell about the guy is that he has an accent and eyes that suggest he is East Asian, and I’m going to go with Chinese.

Playing up the ‘new guy’ role, Ollie explains he’s supposed to be transporting a prisoner, “a Chinese guy who wears a green hood,” and the Unidentified Chinese Mercenary says that sounds like the guy who was taken to the East Camp, and he’s going over there now, so maybe Ollie can hitch a ride? Just as they’re getting into the jeep, however, they are joined by Fyers. DRAMA.

In the jeep, Fyers quizzes MYSTERIOUS NEW RECRUIT, with the usual kind of questions bad guys who suspect good guy infiltration use. “Anything to report on the perimeter?” “Did a new submarine arrive with new recruits?” To which Ollie replies, “I thought every one arrives by plane.” “Indeed they do.” It LOOKS like Ollie passes, but he does a shitpoor job of lying, does Island!Ollie.

When they get to the East Camp, Fyers shows Ollie all the prisoners being kept there, and then punches Ollie to the ground and unmasks him. When Ollie comes to, he is in one of the cages, chained to the rails. Fyers wakes him up, standing by Unidentified Chinese Mercenary. He monologues at Ollie for a bit, about balaclavas revealing only the eyes and how you can tell everything by looking into a person’s eyes. He goes on to talk about trust, and then UCM unmasks..

…DUN DUN DUN it was Sao Fei.

Like I’ve said before: Worst. Mentor. Ever.

The Grown Ups’ Plot which is really the Thea Plot

Thea’s 18th birthday is coming up, and she wants a car! Ollie got a car when he was 18, she points out, but Ollie tells her he could back it out of the driveway without hitting a tree. Also, the parenting of Oliver didn’t produce the kind of visibly responsible young man that Moira presumably wants Thea to grow up into. Me, I’d use the “Walter would get me a car!” line, but not even Thea Queen would stoop that low. Anyway, Moira and Thea are taking a couple of days to meet party planners and go shopping and generally pass Bechdel all over the place.

Meanwhile Tommy asks Ollie about Moira, and he says she seems okay, except “Thea thinks she’s actually been a little bit ‘too okay.’” What with the being cheerful, running the company, erratic behavior &c. Tommy and Ollie are willing to dismiss this as stress behavior, because of course what they don’t know is that Moira’s under a very different kind of stress than they know. She knows where Walter is, after all!

In the car after some successful shopping, Moira and Thea reminisce about Robert and how he was not looking forward to Thea turning 18, and how she now misses him. They are interrupted by John Barrowmerlyn calling Moira and she has to cut her Thea time short, to the other’s disappointment and anger. Moira also lies about who was on the phone.

Moira and Merlyn meet at Queen Consolidated, where he informs her that they have a problem with a guy called Carl Ballard, a friend of Moira’s, who is ‘trying to gentrify the Glades” through unspecified means. This is bad because of Squiggle related reasons, so could Moira tell him not to? Thanks.

NNCR: Carl Ballard is a minor villain who apparently turned up in The Atom. Googling things sydht – all part of the service.

Moira insists that in return she gets proof of life for Walter. Doesn’t she trust Barrowmerlyn. No, she quotes the epsiode’s title “Trust but Verify.” Fine. BUT WAIT, who is that outside the glass fronted office that this secret meeting is taking place in? IT’S THEA. And she’s not happy. She goes straight to Ollie to tell him that Moira and Barrowmerlyn are having an affair.

Ollie’s reaction is along the lines of WTF.

Thea tells him that in the months preceding the boat crash, Robert and Moira had been fighting a lot, and Thea noticed a lot of ‘lunch meetings’ with Barrowmerlyn. She’s seeing similar things after Walter’s disappearance, and putting two and two together, she’s made 4.1. (Having an affair/evil conspiracy. I’ll call them close enough.)

Ollie refuses to believe this of his Mom. Thea points out that he has her on a pedestal rather, and that she (Thea) knows their mother better. Ollie’s response is to go straight to Moira with this information and ask her what was going on.

Moira’s answer is… not an answer. She tells Ollie that Robert “was unfaithful to me repeatedly.” This could mean sleeping around, but it could also mean he was repeatedly unfaithful to Squiggle. But this is really just an excuse for someone to say further things along the lines of finding out someone you thought was perfect is in fact not perfect. Moira also explains that the reason she’s been hanging out with Merlyn is so he can give her “being CEO” advice.

The Party of the Week is Thea’s birthday party and she got a car, yay! She’s also wearing a fabulous dress and I wish L was here to see it. Her bad influence best friends show up with a new drug for her: called Vertigo. Thea, terrified of one of her adult figures finding her with it, goes upstairs to hide.

NNCR: Count Vertigo is probably the second most significant member of Green Arrow’s rogue’s gallery after Merlyn. He has the power to make people incredibly dizzy – which is way more effective than it sounds I swear.

Upstairs, however, Thea runs into Moira and Barrowmerlyn, exchanging a camera photo of Walter for a promise that she’ll “take care of it.” Seeing Barrowmerlyn touch Moira in a smarmy way as he leaves, Thea confronts her. Angry and teenage, she tells Moira she wishes it had been her on the boat, and storms off out of the party and ther house, holding both drugs and the keys to her new car. The next time we see her, she’s clearly doped out of her head, driving, crying, and drowning her sorrows in loud music. (She’s driving along Princess Road, guys. Princess Road!)

But then she takes a corner poorly and almost ploughs straight another car, swerves and ends up in a ditch, unconscious. Oh no!

Cur straight to the hospital, and Ollie and Moira arriving to check on her. It takes no time at all for her to kick Moira out of her room. Ollie says that Moira says she isn’t having an affair, and Thea says she’s not going to trust her.

An unspecified time later, Thea is discharged and leaving, when a policeman (not anyone we already know) turns up, and says that her doctor called them after blood tests. And in front of Ollie, she is arrested for driving under the influence of narcotics. (And guess what? She’s 18 now…)

Tommy and Laurel Need Their Own Show

Tommy isn’t just managing a club, he’s acting as foreman to the construction of the club! It’s adorable, really, how competent he seems. A rich kid with a real building crew instead of LEGO. Of course, he’s not wearing a helmet on the building site, but he’s not that competent. Anyway, his dad (John Barrowmerlyn, remember?) calls to take credit for Tommy getting a job, and to invite himself to Tommy and Laurel’s dinner date tomorrow night.

“I’ve said some pretty hurtful things and I regret them” – NOT AN APOLOGY. “But I still want what I’ve always wanted, for us to be close.” - Guys, I really need to tell you about this super melodramatic KDrama I’m watching and why it’s both the same and better than Arrow in many ways. Becca knows what I’m talking about!

Tommy tells Laurel about this, and how apprehensive he is about Daddy’s motivations. Laurel suggests that maybe Barrowmerlyn does want to build bridges, and Tommy remarks on how she likes to see the best in people.

NNCR: Again, the writers on this show might be inconsistent with the other characters, but they have Dinah Laurel Lance’s optimism down perfectly.

At dinner, John Barrowmerlyn has his pants charmed off by Laurel, and we learn that Tommy’s mother was killed when Tommy was eight – before he knew Laurel. At the end of dinner, casual as anything, Barrowmerlyn hands Tommy a bunch of papers and asks him to sign. On a contract authorizing the closure of his Mom’s free clinic. (Mrs. Merlyn was Thomas Wayne, apparently.) Tommy refuses, seethes at his Dad for not having changed, and storms out. Laurel stays to give Barrowmerlyn a piece of her mind.

“His mother taught him a lesson I’ve been trying to. That the world is a harsh and unforgiving place.”

“When did she teach him that?”

“When she was LYING DEAD IN THE STREET WITH A BULLET IN HER HEAD.” (Emphasis mine.) Yep. Definitely Thomas Wayne.

The next day, Tommy is lounging on Laurel’s couch, and Laurel – who looks DAMN FINE in her lacey boy shorts, says that Barrowmerlyn’s started calling her phone to get in touch with his son. Tommy sulks at it. Laurel agrees that Barrowmerlyn is a joke “But he’s still your father.”

One of those lines that no adults actually say in real life. If parents are jerks they get to be treated like jerks. Are my adult friends the only adults who actually treat their parents like real human beings? Anyway, Laurel says she gets the impression Barrowmerlyn thinks he’s somehow protecting Tommy. Tommy says that his dad completely shut eight-year old Tommy out after his wife’s death, and disappeared for two years -

The cut at this point to Barrowmerlyn’s Evil Arrow Cave and all his swords and bows suggests he disappeared to get Batman training. Also, Barrowmerlyn is creepily stroking a picture of him, his wife and baby Tommy. So there’s more story there and I guess Laurel was right about the protecting? Anyway, I expect someone will try and recruit Tommy into the Squiggle Organization before season 2 is out.

Anyway, that’s the plot! It was full of Diggle. And my favorite version of Diggle, too: the unerringly loyal, intelligent soldier who isn’t afraid to call Ollie out on his shit. If only the show would let him be right occasionally, this would be a perfect episode. As it is: remember that the best Arrow episodes are those where Ollie is a supporting character.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Life Mask – Emma Donoghue

2013-01-23T18:28:12Z

Content Note: homophobia, social exclusion.

I picked up Life Mask because I wanted historical lesbian romance. What I actually got was historical lesbian drama, which is not quite the same thing, and the not getting what I expected threw me off for the first third or so of the book. Then I fell into the story and all was forgiven. Although - although, my expectations of a romance did change my experience of the book, because the romance genre has tropes that a reader expects; like for instance, knowing from the get-go what the end game pairing will be. This is not necessarily the case with Life Mask.

All major and secondary characters are real people, which makes this historical RPF, but my existing knowledge of late 18th century politics was such that is might as well have been new fictional characters for me. Life Mask is set in the “Beau Monde” of the 1780s and 90s London aristocracy. It deals with politics both parliamentary - the characters are generally Whigs and supporters of Charles Fox - and social - the power of rumor and scandal (especially homophobia) are strong themes.

The book is told from three POVs, which Donoghue switches around as she wishes, giving a random feel to the series of vignettes that tell the story. It was disorienting at first, but by the end of the book I was loving all three. They are: (P.S. Wikipedia articles contain spoilers for real life, and therefore for Life Mask.)

Elizabeth Farren (Eliza), an actress at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. She is the daughter of impoverished actors, who came to London with her mother to make her big break and worked her way up into High Society. She spends much of the book navigating a World that she wasn’t born into, managing her expenses and her reputation, and always aware of how fragile is her place in society. Cognizant of the power of scandal to ruin a woman’s life, she guards her virginity fiercely, determined to keep her virtue untarnished until she is married and her place in the World assured.

Edward Smith-Stanley, 12th Earl of Derby. Derby is completely infatuated with Eliza, and at the start of the book, has been her patron for six years. Declining to grant a divorce to his existing wife, he is unable to offer Eliza the legitimacy she demands, and so they spend many years in an uneasy checkmate. He’s kind of the Platonic (ha!) Ideal of a Nice Guy – if he remains her friend, she’ll eventually marry him, right? Of course, he never compounds the situation by calling her names, and from quite early on their situation is made clear, but stuck by situation into one of more-but-not-more than friends. He is a friend of Fox, and a powerful voice for the Whigs in the Lords. His ideals and his views change with age, and with the great political upheavals happening at home and abroad.

Anne Damer, widowed sculptress and favorite godchild of Horace Walpole. Anne is a passionate politico and vocal supporter of Fox, hindered only slightly by the fact that she can’t actually vote. She has a strong passion for many Whig ideals, and watches the French Revolution with hope at first that turns to revulsion when the Rein of Terror sets in. She and Eliza become fast friends very early on, but their relationship is beset by rumors and scandals which has absolutely no grounding in reality - OR DOES IT?

Life Mask is a story about privileged white liberals who fuss over scandal and social injustice and the wars that Britain is fighting overseas in ways I’m sure could ring no bells for any modern reader. The characters discuss the risks and benefits of monarchy vs anarchy, and the petty internal politics that beset a party from inside as well as hinder its attempts for power in a parliament. The role of women in politics is discussed (Why would you want a vote when you can throw political parties?) and while not a large part of the book, a stream of white guilt runs through: Eliza and Anne discuss boycotting rum and sugar because of the slavery implications, then later Eliza notices that her friend is so much more polite to her black servant than her white ones. But still, the book is about rich white folks.

At one point, it became a particularly hard book for me; it’s not a happy, heartlifting lesbian romance, this one. It’s a as-real-as-she-could-make-it portrait of social politics and self realization in the 18th century. And yes, this means that there are violent scenes of a crowd turning to a mob and yelling “sapphist!” and “Tommy!” at the ladies. But more than that, there is the power of the rumor, and the devastating effect of social exclusion, when you sit at a table with your friends, and they make an excuse and leave.

At that point, it doesn’t matter whether the rumors are true or not.

And now we get personal.

—

During a conversation with my Bank Street conference group, we talked about bullying at high school. My advisor asked me if I was out in High School.

I gave one of my incredulous laughs. “Well, I didn’t know. They did, though.”

When I was 13/14 years old on Guide camp, I lay awake, pretended to be asleep, and listened to two people who were supposed to be my ‘friends’ (but only because I had no one more friend-like) adopt the tones you use to tell a particularly gruesome campfire ghost story, and describe with gleeful detail the kind of horrific rape I was obviously longing to commit on the poor girl in the bed next to me. Disgusting right?

When I was 15 on a school trip, I was cornered in a room by a group of girls who wanted me to know that I was a terrible person for lightly hitting someone in defense of their homophobia. Fighting back, it was made clear to me, was absolutely forbidden.

Ad infinitum.

What I’m saying is, social exclusion and isolation hits HUGE FUCKING BUTTONS for me. And if they hit the same buttons for you, then at least you’re going to go into this book warned.

It’s a great book, and an involving book, and the characters are believable and real and completely relatable. But it’s not a happy, sunny, girl meets girl and sssssh no one must ever know simple romance, is what I’m saying.

As a portrait of 1790s London, and the public image of sapphism therein, it’s indispensible.

Not that I have a particular interest in that, or anything.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

The Wonders of Modern Technology

2013-01-23T00:19:57Z

I am having a spate of leaving things in places, because sometimes my brain does that. (Yeah, yeah, it’s a flare up of ADD, and that’s indicative of stress/depression and I should probably be doing stuff about that. But still.)

Like yesterday, when I left my Nook in the museum gallery I was working in, because I could not stop reading my book until the very last second before opening. I didn’t realize I’d left it until I got on the subway and felt about for the boo. With any other book, although the break in reading the book is a wrench, I’d shrug and rock into the museum at the next scheduled time and check to see if my book was still there, because the thing isn’t that much of a loss. But this was my Nook, and those things aren’t easy to replace, so I went all the way back in today and recovered it.

The interrupted reading experience was another thing, though. I’m reading Life Mask by Emma Donoghue at the moment, and the book is hitting me right in the personal experiences. I’m having what the young people these days call “the feels” and I really felt the need to power through the current point in the plot. Not having the book to read on the subway, and when I got home, was upsetting. You’re nerds, you know how it is.

But when I got home, I had this brilliant idea: I have an iPod! I could download the Nook app onto my iPod, download the book I had already bought onto that app, and read it there! It’s not optimal – reading from a backlit screen like my iPod or a laptop strains my eyes, but Nook has a pale-on-dark setting and it’s better than not having 18th century lesbian drama to fall into.

The magic was, though, after I downloaded it and opened the book – it opened not to the front page, but to the last page I’d been on when my Nook was at home and connected to the internet. The app had remembered, and stored with B&N, my last page. So I didn’t even have to electronically flip to about the right place!

We really are living in the future.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.