Two recs for fics you must read now:

The Disappeared by uberaeryn. She's starting a spooky, multipart post-island fic where the castaways are starting to disappear, apparently one by one. (shivers)

Offstage Lines by ficangel. Fantastic gen (with promised J/S slash!) that picks up right where the finale ended. The tension between Locke and Jack mounts, Sawyer and Jin must fend off hungry sharks! Excellent stuff! She's up to 5 chapters already. Go, catch up!


Albums and such
I have a lot of "Best Of" albums and I'm concluding what a scam they are. They're really just a marketing tool (as we all know), because invariably they include a lot of later stuff in a band or artist's career, all the stuff you don't want! And they also invariably leave off several of your favorite songs so you're forced to get back albums anyway. (Or, just DL them. *whistles*)

Is there a "Best Of" album that doesn't do that? That truly is definitive? I'm very fond of Talk Talk's "Natural History," but I only knew three songs on the album when I got it. But say, The Psychedelic Furs. Where is "Into You Like a Train?" "Sleep Comes Down?" "India?" Instead we get some stuff from 1991! No good. Or if it's a band like The Smiths (yes, I'm mentally stuck in the '80s this week), then you get the same songs over and over in various compilations, like, ahem "Louder than Bombs."

Then again, if it's a band or album you really like, it's not a chore to get all, or nearly all the albums. Like "The Cure." I just want to hear "Head on the Door" all the way through, in its entirety. Breaking the songs up isn't sacrilege, but there are some albums, like U2's, I like to hear all the way through. Anymore, I don't think people listen to albums as a whole. I got a load of Joseph Arthur songs from luckinfovely (where are you, anyway, hon?) and I was listening to them all out of order. Then I listened to "Redemption's Son" as a whole and really loved it as an album. It even made me like some of the songs I hadn't liked as much at first.

So do you have any current or past albums you *must* listen to as a whole? Or am I just an old, old fogey?


Summer TV doldrums
I remain less than impressed with the crop of summer programming. "The 4400" last episode was so dull I'm not sure I'm going to keep watching. I could take or leave "Into the West." "The Closer" was gimmicky and I didn't like the main character. I could see they were trying to make her a tough, independent broad but she wasn't intriguing enough to balance out the roughness. I was disappointed in the interrogation scenes, which I gathered would be the gist of the whole show. Just makes me miss "Homicide: Life on the Street" even more. So far, nothing can touch the fic I've been reading!