Oh dear.

Gah, every time I try to work on the theme set for June, I wear out. I wrote several sentences and now I feel restless and bushed. As much as I wanted to use all of these themes, I wonder if I'll be able to. I may have to just pick a few over the month and keep all the others to just use whenever I feel up to it. Maybe it's just too much to try to do the themes every day for two straight months, in addition to all my other projects. I have The Denying Detective Perry mystery, I revived a YGO mystery, I'm expanding one of my ficlets for posting on FF.net, I have my One Minute to Zero fic that I finally got off the ground, and I'm doing my blogging and my freelance article writing.

It also doesn't help that this time I was writing May's themes almost right up to the wire, as opposed to when I did the set in February and managed to get them all done by about the middle of the month. I had more time for a breather. March would have probably been a good time to jump into another theme set, after the respite I had, rather than trying to immediately jump into this one now for June.

EDIT: ... Or I wonder if it could be a combination of that weariness and the actual plot of the theme set draining me. It is a rather depressing plot. Hmmm. I wonder what would happen if I took the plot of this particular blurb and wrote it as not being part of this takeover thing. Maybe I'll try that and see if I still feel the same exhaustion. I wrote a bit of my ficlet expansion and that didn't wear me down at all.

And out of utter curiosity, I read a short Hetalia fic tonight when it wandered onto my Friend's list via a community. I know the series is extremely popular, but I've always been baffled by how you can personify nation-states. Those feelings were not alleviated after reading the fic. If anything, I scratched my head and wondered all the more how it's done. It makes no sense at all to me. How can a nation-state be a person and have a house?

The only way I can logically interpret things is if the Hetalia characters are basically the "spirits" of the nation-states rather than the physical lands themselves. And maybe that is what's intended; I don't know. But it still felt very surreal.

Ellery Queen

I finally got hold of a disc of the 1970s series of Ellery Queen Mysteries, due to wanting to see in full an episode with Simon Oakland. While I had the disc, we logically watched the rest of it too.

Overall, I'm not sure what to make of it. The theme song, hands-down, is absolutely awesome and epic. I've still got it in my head now.

But I do have some quibbles. Well, this first one isn't really anything against the series, just something I was personally disappointed about. I suppose this sounds silly, but I was thoroughly convinced that it took place in the present day of its time when I saw part of Simon's episode some time back. I was so extremely convinced of that, that seeing the thing in full and being forced to realize that it takes place in the 1940s was an extreme shock.

I love period pieces, make no doubt about that. But it just wasn't what I was expecting this time. I thought it was a present-day series, one that hence could move to whatever time period you want it to.

And somehow I wasn't always fully convinced of the setting. I don't know if that's just because I believed it was the 1970s at first or if they didn't do such a good job. Yet it seems like they did; cars and women's hairstyles and even the behavior of some of the Girl Fridays all felt very 1940s.

The mysteries were very intense and interesting. Overall, though (and here's where I actually speak against the series), I also felt that the set-up there didn't really work very well. It seemed like the guilty parties came out of nowhere, with little to no prior evidence for their motivations. And before everyone cries out that Perry Mason sometimes fell back on that too, let me elaborate on the differences.

In Perry, we usually see a bunch of people with motives to kill the victim long before the victim is dead. On this show, by contrast, the person usually pops up dead with no or little motives given for anyone until afterwards. Clues are sometimes hard to see on both shows, but Ellery Queen actively and literally invites the audience to participate, so to me it seems ridiculous to set the mysteries up in a way that a majority of the audience may have trouble figuring out the solutions. (Or maybe it's directed more towards brainiacs/die-hard amateur detectives. Hmmm.)

Maybe I'm just comparing it too much to Perry. I don't know; I didn't really like the set-up on Ellery Queen, particularly the stuff involving the guilty parties. I liked the mysteries themselves and the settings (one took place at a rehearsal of the Mad Tea Party scene from Alice in Wonderland, LOL). The characters were alright. Ellery himself was sort of kooky/eccentric/even absent-minded (but very brilliant). I dunno, though; I usually don't care much for the kooky types (even though they give me a good laugh). I'd rather see a more serious, tough detective.

I only got the disc because of Simon, so unless I hear of another episode with someone I'm nuts about, I don't think I care to see more of the series. I can understand why it only ran for one season.