Wow, it's been awhile since I've posted! I have a bunch of stuff I'm working on offline, so it feels like I've been writing, I guess. Also: I finally went back and retrieved all 300 gigs of mp3s from the hard drive that crashed a couple of years ago! But it came back with the organization all messed up and a bunch of duplicate files. So there's that keeping me busy.

I've also been watching Hogan's Heroes. (There's a story here, though not a very interesting one: when I was in high school, on the library shelf I found a very old copy of The Great Escape - Brickhill's book, not the movie - and it was on the, I think, biography shelves, which happened to be a good place to hide when one had snuck into the library during lunch without a pass, so I probably read it about four times, because it is a really good book, and also? When one is really, really in need of escapism? Also a good book.

I was reminded of this recently when I had a really epically bad teaching day, and then came home and watched a documentary on excavations at Stalag 13, but I don't actually own a copy of The Great Escape, so I was like, hmm, I've never seen Hogan's Heroes, I wonder if it's up on youtube?

And of course it is.)

I am kind of in love with this show now, guys. I think the main thing that's tipped it over from "this is a fun show!" to "OMG must watch the whole thing where's the fanfic" is-- well, when I was watching Stargate SG1? My absolute favorite thing was when O'Neill was up against something far more powerful than him (whether a millennium-old god creature or just the Pentagon) and he'd go all snarky and manipulative and fake-compliant and then defeat them utterly with the power of teamwork, competence, and shenanigans.

I'm pretty sure that, in those scenes I loved so much, O'Neill (or at least RDA) was deliberately playing Colonel Hogan. They don't look at all alike, but the body language and the particular inflections used when taunting people who could have you killed? Dead on. So in some sense Hogan's Heroes is just like half-an-hour-at-a-time concentrated doses of my favorite things about O'Neill.

Also it's in general a good show and it is just plain fun. And I'm about fifty episodes in and it's only tripped my embarrassment squick twice, which is amazing for an American sitcom of whatever age. And it's set in an all-male WWII prison camp and yet, with its average of one kickass female resistance fighter/Russian spy/chorus girl per episode, it's already managed to pass the Bechdel test about three or four times, which is more than a lot of modern TV shows which aren't set in prison camps can do.

...Someone on my network list is in the middle of a Colditz rewatch. I feel like I should start watching along if only as penance for how very much I am enjoying Hogan's Heroes, only I watched the Colditz pilot and it isn't any fun. The Great Escape may have been set in the middle of a terrible war and ended with unbelievable tragedy and cruelty, but it managed to find the fun in life despite that.

(I have started writing an HH fic where they all have soulbonded wolves and also a Homestuck fusion where Vriska is kommandant of an Alternian prison camp, and has an ongoing black flirtation with Col. John Egbert, the senior human officer. Hopefully I will not finish either of them. :P I keep getting these random guilt attacks for writing a fusion based on a show set in Nazi Germany but then I think, wait, in canon Alternia is worse than that, my most difficult problem with the fusion is trying to figure out why the trolls aren't just slaughtering everybody.)