Day is dawning, morning is mourning.

Real status post later. I'm in the process of waking up from ~12 hours of sleep. Not uninterrupted, but only briefly interrupted. After two months without needing it, I'd forgotten how valerian gives me pretty much wall-to-wall dreaming. I wish I remember more of them. I know in one of them, Jack and our poly family was living in the town I grew up in. Flats, who was put to sleep Wednesday night, appeared more than once.

Friday

Random Link

So I slept through a message from popelizbet last night that this morning has turned me on to something so amazing that I'm putting the link up top instead of at the bottom of this post.

Apparently, at some point when I wasn't looking, Cat Valente wrote Deathless, a novel about Russian fairy tales set in the Stalinist era. It's not out yet, but you can read a three chapter excerpt and a kick-awesome comic book adaptation of part of it online, for free.

I seriously have no idea how I missed this project up until now. It looks like it may, in fact, be the greatest thing ever.

News For Today

Regular Tales of MU service will resume Monday. I've got things just about hammered out with where things are going in the remainder of the first volume.

Personal Assessment

I slept a ton last night. I feel okay today. Moderate fog, which is to be expected after the melatonin. No idea what tonight will be like. I'm definitely going to be pilling it for the next few nights or so, at the very least.

Plans For Today

I've been piddling around with Gift of the Bad Guy. I'm going to wrap up what I'm writing there, take a hot bath, and then start working on the Blackwater Province folktales that have been bobbing around my head for the past few days.

Writer's Block: How could you?

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If it was within 30 days and I still had the receipt, definitely. I might change my mind if for some reason I could only get store credit.

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I'm currently trying to stay awake a little bit longer so that I don't end up having a melatonin-vs.-caffeine grudge match in my brain tonight, but I'm past the point of being able to do anything productive so I thought I'd take a little bit of time to share some of my thoughts on Doctor Who, following the 2010 Christmas Special.

When I saw the most recent season finale, one of my reactions was "This is the timey-wimiest thing I've seen in a long time." And I heartily approved of that. And then with the Christmas Carol homage, things got even timier and perhaps a bit wimier.

I like this. I like that the TARDIS is no longer just a prop and a vehicle for moving between episodes. If every problem gets solved through time travel, it will be annoying, but it's kind of annoying when no problem ever gets solved through time travel (save insofar as time travel brings the solution to the scene, in the form of the Doctor).

Now, there is a potential conflict with what's been established before (and that's kind of time travel in a nutshell, innit?), as it's both been shown and explicitly stated that once the TARDIS lands in the middle of things, it's part of events and they can't just jump around all willy-nilly. Right? But it's also been shown that it's possible to bend this, and while the results of pushing it too far can be world-shattering... well, it's been shown that the geography (for lack of a better word) of time varies. Some places the rules are stricter than others. Some places they manifest differently. The Doctor can see the lay of the land. He knows what's fixed and what's in flux.

So why is the Doctor suddenly playing faster and looser with the time/space continuum?

There are a couple different ways to make sense of this.

The Tenth Doctor's realization that he's the sole remaining arbiter of these things didn't work out quite as triumphantly as he might have hoped, but his ill-fated attempt to twist a fixed historical event past its breaking point might have reinforced to him the idea that history can take care of itself... that fixed is fixed, no matter what he does... while also opening up to him the possibility that things can be tweaked to a greater extent than he'd realized.

Also, the Eleventh Doctor seems more alien and less in touch with humanity than either of his two immediate predecessors. Might he not be more in tune with the wibbly-wobbliness of it all? If one subscribes to the theory that the regenerations are reactive, this makes a good deal of sense. Rose was in love with Nine, who couldn't (romantically) love her back, so he regenerated into Ten, who ~*just had a lot of feelings*~. These feelings made it difficult for Ten to function, towards the end, and impossible for him to face his death. So we get Eleven, who is somewhat of a throwback... sillier, and stranger, and more Time Lord.

I'm of the opinion that a lot of the most recent season makes more sense if you assume that throughout it, Eleven's mind is operating on a different level than even he is used to. There are times that he's literally ahead of/behind his own thought processes (same thing, from a different perspective.) He is literally thinking fourth dimensionally. It's possible that <=Ten wouldn't have dared to try to stunts that Eleven did in the season finale and the Christmas special because they couldn't see time the way he does.

And if this sort of stunt does depend on the geography of the timey-wimey ball, then we have our answer for why he can't do it all the time. Sometimes it's possible, sometimes it's not. Is it arbitrary? Yes. But so is the rule that says the TARDIS can never be used for on-the-spot mucking about with time and space.

Anyway, that's a lot of fanwank and speculation. I just hope we see more timey-wimey hijinks in the coming season. Given that we're going to be seeing more of the reverse-romance with [Insert Title Here] River Song in it, that seems almost inevitable.