Sick on a sunny day

I'm spending today loafing around, recovering from some mild but lengthy bug I picked up while traveling. If you too find yourself trapped inside on a sunny weekend while all your friends have gone to Seattle to be tourists, go listen to this recording of Wil Wheaton, Jonathan Frakes and Levar Burton talking about Star Trek at Phoenix Comicon. It is good medicine. Warning: You may have the Reading Rainbow theme in your head the rest of the day.

In other news, I just finished a story I've been poking at for a while which features methane-based aliens with an outpost on Titan. Score! I love Titan. However, I don't love biology, and I've started a sequel to that story which focuses more on the aliens, which were only described in passing in the first story. My internal worldbuilding geek says I should find out how plausible their biology would be. (Reading that Centauri Dreams article, I had the thought, "would they live in extremely cold temperatures? That would suck for my purposes.") How plausible is it for a creature to see x-rays? (I think I'll give them a separate x-ray sensing organs, like pit vipers' infrared-detectors. I have them wearing special masks when they look at x-rays, but if they needed that, then how the heck would they evolve them in the first place? Wait, I have an idea!) This, my friends, is why I don't usually write science fiction. I'm just going to go with what I've got and flip the bird at my inner geek.

Ugh, sinus headache. I think I'm going to play some Echo Bazaar and then see if I can take a nap without being disturbed by the cat currently sleeping on my bed.

(no subject)

Feeling restless at the end of a lazy day convalescing. I watched the pilot episode of Justified, which I got free somewhere and have been meaning to get around to watching. It was solid. I can't say I'm too sad that Timothy Olyphant has gotten typecast as a US Marshall carrying around a lot of repressed anger. I would have watched more, but I'm not in a state to blow 3 dollars an episode off iTunes.
Instead, I discovered that Hulu decided to work for me today, so I watched the original Battlestar Galactica. I thought it would be more cheesy, and that the reboot would have grittied it up, but apparently not. (Though the Cylons and Baltar's hair satisfied my cheese expectations. Buttskirts!)

Then Hulu decided to revert to its usual jerky self, so I switched to my dvd collection of Babylon 5. I'm rewatching Season 4, which contains my favorite parts (anything with Londo and G'kar) and my least favorite parts (anything inspired by Lord of the Rings. Who the hell thought Lorien was a good idea?) That show has some amazing actors...who really make the hams stand out. Not that anyone could have made Delenn more tolerable.

I was considering writing. I've got a story idea that I need to make a plot for, and I'm toying with making it novella length or more. I think instead I'll throw in some more B5, instead.