Meme - caving to peer pressure:

[concertigrossi]

Pick a paragraph (or any passage between... let's say 200 and 600 words) from anything I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

Comments

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

Oh, oh, one more! Am I allowed one more? From "In Perpetuity":

He’d lived for pleasure, for a time. He’d even devoted an entire decamillennium to sex and all its wonderful, consenting-adult iterations. Against all probability, against anything anyone he ever knew would have predicted for him, it palled.
So he travelled almost randomly, and tried to help people wherever he found trouble. A bit hokey, perhaps, but it worked for The Doctor, didn’t it?
He was currently on Progera, a little backwater world. Two separate sentient species had evolved on the planet: the St’laga and the Neigeta, and though they’d once coexisted peacefully, the St’laga had gained dominion over the planet, and enslaved the Neigeta. An underground resistance movement had grown up over the centuries, and found a natural leader in Jack, once he landed there.
With his guidance, they triumphed.
However, as it happened, while the revolution started in the hope that peace and equality could be restored once more, the Neigeta elected to power those who sought only revenge. The oppressed became the oppressors, and Jack began to protest. This was always how it seemed to work out: revolutionaries would rise up to right all wrongs, and a few centuries later, they were the jackbooted tyrants everyone wanted to overthrow. And tyrants are distinctly unamused when one of the original revolutionaries sticks around to tell them what they’re doing wrong. They had no compunction about shutting him up in prison, and they’d heard about the Immortal Man, so the security system was built accordingly.
When the Wheel turned again, and the tyrants were turned out, he was fêted as a hero. They returned his original possessions, but enough time had passed that the pages of The Book were crumbling to dust.
He left the planet as fast as he could.
He reconstituted The List, but this time he had it carved onto blocks of basalt, and placed on an uninhabited planet in the far reaches of the Mandala galaxy. Let it be set in stone, he thought. It was as good a monument to his life as any.

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

Of course you get more than one. :)

The idea that eternity would get really boring after a while is pretty common, and I think what would get to him would be the futility of a lot of what he does. He'll make a difference for a little while, but things always change, sometimes for the good and sometimes for the better, but in the long run, it's not necessarily he that made it happen one way or the other.

So in the end, what has he really accomplished? He loved a lot of people.

I was reading a lot of Russian history, which is just chock full of assassinations and turmoil and oppression, no matter the century; specifically Trotsky. He might've been one of the leaders of the October Revolution, but see how much that mattered when Stalin's rise started. He criticized Stalin too much, and got exiled and eventually assassinated.

And btw, he was in jail for a damned long time. That summer, I went to an exhibition at the Met of medieval drawings on paper... it was quite humbling to stand in front of a case containing thousand-year-old pieces of paper.

Incidentally, the alien race names? I was drinking a bottled STout and LAGer at the time. The other race would have been Blakta (Black and Tan), except that referring to an enslaved race as anything remotely resembling the word "black" seemed to draw parallels that I really didn't want to invoke. The opposite of black is white, but Whiteta wasn't any better. Somehow, thinking of this, I clicked onto the French word for "snow" aka neige, and TA DA, Neigeta.

I hate coming up with names. The composer later in that piece is so named because I was driving near saraTOGA SPRIngs when I came up with him.

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

Haha! I remember the Saratoga Springs thing - I was wondering where these ones came from. I liked this bit because I liked the idea that history has basically become tedious for Jack - first one guy's in, then another, and really it's just more of the same. At least he can afford to wait out the hostile regimes. I dunno, this whole sequence drove home Jack's situation for me in a way all of his melodrama on the show hasn't.