Four Things and a Lizard

Welcome to “Four Things and a Lizard.” When I started this blog, my desire was to write about science fiction on television. More recently I’ve decided that theater movies might be nice to talk about sometimes too, not to mention a general broadening of the overall scope to include “imaginative fiction.” That could include anything from David Lynch movies to Harry Potter, really. However, the main focus will be as it first was, namely sci fi television shows.

There are a lot of shows, and I’m hoping to cover a variety of them. That’s a pretty big task, though, and I do have to work for a living. My dream of creating an episode-by-episode commentary on the entire Stargate: SG-1 series is probably never going to happen. Even doing that for a shorter series like the original Star Trek may not be practical. On the other hand, there are only 14 Firefly episodes…. :)

Lately I’ve been talking a lot about the two Stargate series. That’s just where my focus has been recently. It won’t necessarily always be like that. I’m not intending for this to be primarily a Stargate blog in the long run. There would have been a lot more talk about Battlestar Galactica recently, for instance, if I had been blogging actively while the first half of seaon four was airing.

THERE MAY BE SPOILERS. Sorry about that, but it’s just not practical for me to fastidiously avoid those. Spoiler content may be mitigated by the fact that I often don’t see a program right away, and by the fact that there’s no way I can cover everything. I’m not going to intentionally post spoilers just for the sake of doing so. It’ll always be in the service of whatever point I’m trying to make.

Doctor Who fans may recognize the title of this blog as a quote from the David Tennant episode “Blink.” I thought it was funny (in fact, it would make a really great band name, don’t you think?), and “Blink” is one of the best episodes from the new Doctor Who series. The address of this blog itself, “sg13.wordpress.com”, is a reference to an especially excellent Stargate: SG-1 double episode called “Heros,” in which SG-13 is prominantly featured on a very ill-fated expedition to planet P3X-666. SG-13 is led by a favorite actor of mine, none other than Adam Baldwin, of Firefly fame. He’s every bit as amusing in his brief stint on SG-1 as he was on Firefly. I often wished that the writers of SG-1 would have brought SG-13 back in one of the succeeding seasons, but alas, it never happened.

Categories: I’ll be having one category for each show. There will not be overarching categories for “Star Trek” or “Stargate”, but rather one category for each series that I write about. A post gets assigned to the one category into which it best fits. In other words, a post that’s mostly about Torchwood would be assigned to the “Torchwood” category, even if Star Trek: Voyager happens to be mentioned a few times for comparison. References to other shows will be tagged, so that means I’ll end up with a few tags which duplicate my main categories. This is fine, because the functionality of tags and categories here isn’t quite the same anyway.

At this point I’m uncertain how I’m going to handle situations where two different shows both have the same name, nor have I decided how I’m going to handle the variety of different Doctors on Doctor Who. There’s also the question of duplicate character names, for instance a character on Star Trek: Voyager who was also named “The Doctor.”

Tags are proving to be a little complicated. Tagging is an inherantly chaotic way of doing things, so my attempts to predefine a system for it have not proven to be effective. Until I think of anything better, the defacto system for tags is to not really have a system, but just to tag anything which seems like it might be interesting. This results in a lot of tags. I guess that’s fine. The annoying part is ending up with slightly duplicated tags, such as “Samantha Carter” and “Dr. Samantha Carter”. The functionality of the WordPress tag manager is limited enough so that controlling duplication like that is going to be tough.

[revised July 29, 2008]

[revised again August 25, 2008]