a conspiracy of cartographers

Today it is below 80 degrees! There is a breeze! The birds are singing! (No, really, I am next to an open window and birds are singing outside, though I can also hear traffic noises cos, y'know, city.) The weather is GLORIOUS, is what I'm saying here. And White Collar is back! I am often terrible about posting White Collar reactions, and then I get irritated with my past self because sometimes I like to reread reaction posts to remind myself what's going on in the show; but I'm sorry, future self, I'm not posting any White Collar reactions today either, though it does remain the show of my heart, oh gosh I just love it so much.

Instead, today I am posting about The Hollow Crown!

Before I say anything else I should note that I am so very much not an expert on these plays. I've read Richard II and Henry IV (part one only) a total of once each, and never read Henry V; I've seen one previous production of Henry IV, cut dramatically to fit both parts into three hours, and two previous productions of Henry V. So I come to this armed with shaky knowledge of the text, though also with lots of Hal feelings that predate my Hiddleston feelings by some years. Okay! That's covered, time for some SHAKESPEARE FEELINGS.

( The Hollow Crown! Cut for length, and I guess production spoilers. Um, and also my perennial shallowness for Tom Hiddleston, but this shouldn't come as a surprise. )

At the moment I am reading one of my Christmas presents, Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything, and am delightedly rediscovering, in engaging laymen's terms, a lot of mind-bendingly wonderful stuff I forgot since first-year astronomy class. (To be fair, I also learned some of it from The Science of Discworld, but I read that before the astronomy class, so the only part that really stuck is how bogglingly vast everything is.) I love reading about the creation of the universe, because it's mostly about how we don't know anything at all, and how the conditions for even the laws of physics as we know them are pretty much impossible but happened anyway, maybe because there are infinite universes and we just happen to live in this one. Whenever I get to the part where the universe has no edges and even when it was tiny beyond all knowing it was still all there was, I start wanting to keyboard with joy. I don't even know why it makes me so happy! I do know that it makes me want to write Doctor Who fic that is less about the technical science than it's about how huge and alien and wonderful the universe is.

Relatedly, I can't stop watching this preview clip from End of Time part 2. It's like that one bit of Frontier in Space, with bonus bondage! I'm starting to suspect that Russel T. Davies is some sort of horrible quantum thing that does everything I've ever wanted and destroys all my hopes and dreams at the same time. DON'T BLINK.

And I watched Tennant's Hamlet. slfddfjdf I -- I can't talk about it very coherently. I was expecting to at least enjoy it, because I am quite easy for David Tennant; what I wasn't expecting was to be riveted. ( Cut for space; the spoilers, by the way, are that everyone gets poisoned and dies. ) A++ WILL ABSOLUTELY WATCH AGAIN.