bookofdanielvol2

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A reread of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I had intended to reread Through the Looking-Glass, too, but to my distress I found that I no longer enjoyed the absurdism of the first book (maybe politics have imitated art a little too hard in this area recently?), so it seemed pointless to subject myself to the second as well.

Maybe I’ll give it another go in a decade or two and find that I’ve come back around to enjoying it again.

What I’m Reading Now

A little bit of this and a little bit of that, but nothing that merits a progress report right now. My attention has been mostly taken up with the exigencies of a plumbing crisis, alas.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still waiting for the library to bring me Evelina!

netgirl_y2k

Just had a lovely walk with Freya around the park. Met a dog called Elmo, a dog called Fenrir, and a dog called Gus, which cover all three of the platonic ideals of dog naming, 1) this is a muppet, 2) this is a wolf, and 3) this is an elderly human.

Freya and I also took a little trip last weekend up to Inverness to hang out with

tamoline and her wife who were on holiday up there, which was a lot of fun, not least because Freya accidentally tobogganed down their stairs, got herself trapped in their kitchen, and then decided that she wanted to live with them. If you are ever meeting online friends for the first time and are worried that it might be a little awkward I can highly recommend taking a stupid wolf with you as a conversation starter.

I happened to mention to my mum later that I'd gone up north to spend the day with some online friends who were up from England, and after a long pause she said '...I thought your internet friends lived in Germany?' To which I indignantly pointed out that I'm personable, people like me, I have more than one friend; this was met by a more sceptical look than you want from your mother.

We watched the series finale of Doctor Who, to which my reaction was, and still remains, holy, hail Mary pass, Batman! I am generally of the school of thought that spreadsheet dorks are a curse on most forms of entertainment, but I also kind of want to go to the pub with a Disney accountant just so that after, like, three drinks I can go 'So, Doctor Who, how's that math mathing?'

I also have gripes about how heteronormative the finale was, but that's increasingly the new normal, isn't it? I love living through a time of enormous backlash to any and all social progress orchestrated by history's greatest fuckwits.

In gayer news, here are some books that I have been reading:

The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet by Linz McLeod - Publishing a series of lesbian romances about Jane Austen characters is God's work, so I don't want to criticise it too harshly, not least because as a f/f regency romance it is perfectly delightful, but as a piece of Austen fanfiction it was, eh, Charlotte Lucas felt really true to character, but Mary Bennet could have been anybody, she felt half author's OC, half thinly veiled Lizzie.

That said, I will be picking up next year's The Miseducation of Caroline Bingley as soon as it comes out because God's work.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh - I was so excited for this because Tesh's previous facist punching novel Some Desperate Glory had easily been my favourite of that year, so I was kind of bummed that I didn't like this one as much. Maybe it was the genre change, instead of sci-fi it was magical realism set at a contemporary magic school; maybe it was my class chippiness, I'm not entirely sure that private school pupils don't deserve to be eaten by demons; maybe it was that it was heavily talked up as having a central f/f relationship, which honestly felt kind of tacked on, while much more time was spent on the het relationship with a dude that the reader realises is the villain, like, a hundred pages before the protagonist.

Like, it's fine, it's good even, my expectations were just a bit out of control. Also, go read Some Desperate Glory.

The Vengeance by Emma Newman - Pirates, and werewolves, and vampires, and lesbians, oh my! Our protagonist has spent her life at sea during the golden age of piracy when she discovers her "mother" is no such thing, and embarks on a fish out of water road trip through pre-revolution France, running from werewolves, kissing girls, and fighting vampires.

Is it a lot? Yes. Is it totally awesome? Also, yes!

osprey_archer

The university where I work happens to have a bronze cast of Degas’ “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen”, so before I read Camille Laurens’ book of the same name (recommended by

troisoiseaux), I went to have a good long look at the sculpture.

It’s less than life-size - perhaps two-thirds, one-half the size of the actual fourteen-year-old dancer. You can see the bronze creases in her stockings at the ankles and knees, the places where socks begin to wear out. Her forehead slopes back sharply, more sharply really than I think the human forehead can. Her hair hangs down her back in a rope braid, which is tied with a golden satin ribbon. A real ribbon, fabric rather than bronze.

She wears, too, a cloth tutu, and the curator told us (when I visited with my parents months ago) that the tutu has to be replaced every now and then, always to great debate about exactly how it should look, as the tutu on Degas’ original statue (wax, not bronze) was long gone when collectors decided to make a metal cast. How long should it be? What color? What kind of fabric?

The one at my university is about knee-length, much pleated, creamy pale layers of some fabric that might be tulle, the outer layer purposely frayed for the bottom quarter inch or so. The dancer’s feet are in the fourth position, but her hands are behind her back, and seem rather large for her size.

Thus prepared, I dived into Camille Laurens’ Little Dancer Age Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas’ Masterpiece, translated by Willard Wood. Laurens is attempting to write a biography of Marie van Goethem, the girl who posed for the famous sculpture, but as there is very little material about Marie, it becomes a hodgepodge of other things, including a partial biography of Degas (and indeed it’s filed under his name at my library).

The book is also about the historical conditions of the young dancers at the Paris Opera, who were called rats and generally assumed to offer sexual favors on the side, giving the ballet a scandalous vibe that most 21st century viewers probably don’t pick up from looking at Degas’ pictures, since nowadays ballet is seen as a refined high art. (Is a picture, or a sculpture, worth a thousand words? Or can it tell us anything that we don’t already know?)

And it’s about the initial reception of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, which more or less universally appalled viewers when it was first exhibited. Was it because Degas modeled the sculpture’s head to fit what was then considered the physiognomy of criminals? (Hence the sharply sloping forehead.) The association of ballet dancers with prostitution, which perhaps becomes a little queasy-making when you look at this flat-chested statue of a child?

Or the fact that the original statue was modeled in grayish wax, so the little dancer must have looked just a little corpse-like? A completely different viewing experience than the bronze cast I studied so carefully.

Degas, Laurens notes, was upset about the restoration attempts on a famous painting in the Louvre, a Rembrandt if I recall correctly. It was not the quality of the attempt that he objected to, but the fact that an attempt was made at all. Art, Degas thought, is a living thing; and like all living things, an artwork has its time to die.

viridian5

HBO has a 3-episode documentary series called The Mortician. Episode 1 has some horrifying events and you think you know the basic shape of how things will get worse and who's involved. Episode 2? Mwahahaha. Surprise! I'm curious to see how the final episode goes.

Otherwise, I'm enjoying today's birthday gifts: a top, 3 CDs (Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism and Plans, and Jack's Mannequin's The Glass Passenger) and this keychain.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: "A Lack of Color" by Death Cab for Cutie

osprey_archer

Joan Aiken finished the last two books in the Wolves of Willoughby Chase sequence just before her death in 2004. The penultimate book, Midwinter Nightingale, has certain flaws that indicate a rushed or weary author, but before I discuss these flaws I do want to state that I’m very glad Aiken did write these books, as it seems right and proper that the series should come full circle with Dido and Simon at the end.

The main flaw in Midwinter Nightingale was the pacing, which is usually Aiken’s strong suit: in most of her book she packs so many happenings into a chapter that

littlerhymes and I struggled to discuss all the developments. But here, the characters spend the first half of the book wandering more or less aimlessly before the plot really kicks off.

Also, this is petty but I just have to complain, Aiken offers three separate and incompatible lengths for the time that has elapsed since King Dick’s coronation. It happened 15 years ago, as it coincided with his marriage to his (second) wife Princess Adelaide. (As it turns out, Prince Davie who died in the mines was the son of King Dick’s hitherto unmentioned first wife, which means Davie was a teenager when he went to investigate the mines, which is better than going off to investigate at the age of about five as I first thought.)

But it also happened six years ago, because that’s when Dido said she first got back to England, and as we know Dido saved the ceremony which otherwise would have been interrupted by St. Paul’s Cathedral rolling into the Thames. But then Dido mentions her adventures on the island of Aratu, which happened before her return to England, as occurring “two or three years ago.” WHICH IS IT, AIKEN? Please just stop giving us numbers.

However, it is lovely to be back with Dido again. Is is fine but she’s just not the same. I enjoyed the reappearance of Aiken’s trademark ferocious creatures in the form of a moat filled with man-eating fish and crocodiles (although I’m still so sad they killed spoiler redacted and spoiler redacted!), and also the unexpected plot point of two completely non-ferocious bears. They just want Simon to give them head massages to help them cope with the wet cold of England! Who among us has not dreamed of a bear friend?

The next (and last) book is very short, and was in fact published posthumously. I envision Aiken writing it on a legal pad in her hospital bed, and will not hold it against her if it occasionally devolves from prose into a list of bullet points.

osprey_archer

I’ve never owned my own TV before, but one of my friends had an extra which became mine when I moved into the Hummingbird Cottage. A Target gift card had just come into my possession as a housewarming gift, so I traipsed off to Target for a DVD player.

“I didn’t know we sold those anymore,” the bemused clerk informed me. (Target does, however, have a large record selection. Also WiFi enabled record players. What a time to be alive.)

Undeterred, I made my purchase, and drove home happily dreaming of all the new movies and shows I would watch.

I did in fact manage to watch a couple of new movies: Studio Ghibli’s The Red Turtle, a wordless movie about a man marooned on an island who ends up marrying a turtle who turns into a woman (as turtles are wont to do), and Werner Herzog’s Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, which is a fascinating documentary about trappers in the taiga, although it does keep saying things like “These trappers are almost untouched by modern civilization” as the trappers zoom off in their snow mobiles. I mean. Maybe a little touched by modern civilization?

However, what I’ve mostly been doing is rewatching old favorites. I rewatched the Romola Garai Emma and the pre-Raphaelite miniseries Desperate Romantics (both of which I own), and contemplated borrowing the 2006 Jane Eyre and 2008 Sense and Sensibility miniseries from the library before deciding that no, it was better to wait till I could find them used somewhere, and therefore enjoy the thrill of the hunt.

(I have not yet found either of those miniseries, but on my last visit to Half Price Books I DID find a copy of the 1981 Brideshead Revisited miniseries for a mere $10!!! which was instantly stolen by a friend who hasn’t seen it yet. Which is fair enough I guess.)

I did get the first two seasons of The Vicar of Dibley from the library, and have now started in on their Poirot collection, and was disconcerted to discover that with Poirot in particular I have barely any memory of the show. Things like the bit where Miss Lemon says “Poirot looked middle-aged even as a baby,” yes. The solutions to the mysteries? No. Gone. Might as well have never watched the show. Which is convenient for a rewatch, admittedly.

As much as I’m enjoying my rewatches, however (season one of Downton Abbey next?), I would like to stir a few new-to-me things into the mix as well.

1. I’ve started the 1981 sitcom A Fine Romance, because (a) it stars Judi Dench, and (b) the episodes are half an hour long. (I’m a sucker for shows with half hour episodes.) It’s cute, but I’m not totally sold yet. Will give it a few more episodes and see how I feel.

2. On the topic of half hour shows (actually 22-minute shows), I’ve heard Abbott Elementary is fantastic. Yes? No? Maybe so?

3. Given my love of Poirot, I was looking thoughtfully at the Miss Marple adaptations. But alas they’re all two hours long, and I turn into a pumpkin at about 60 minutes.

4. Has anyone seen Flambards? Would you recommend it? I’m considering it because it’s on the shelf at the library and I have a vague memory of someone, somewhere, gushing about it, except maybe they were gushing about the book that it’s based on and not the show.

5. I attempted to watch a Vanity Fair miniseries, by which I mean that I got a copy out of the library and then never even put it in the DVD player because the thought of watching Becky Sharp be mean to people while smiling sweetly was too stressful. Strongly suspect I would feel the same way about the classic 1979 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries, which is unfortunate as it would be the perfect capper for my George Smiley readings.

6. However, as a general rule, I do enjoy book to miniseries adaptations, especially if they’re period pieces and the episodes are less than an hour long. So please let me know if you have recs!

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

1. Have you ever been to summer camp?

2. Have you ever made a s'more?

3. Have you ever slept under the stars (no tent/tarp)?

4. Have you ever had a member of the opposite sex sleep over at your house?

5. What type of bed do you have (queen, twin, bunk, etc.)?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

osprey_archer

I went into John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies with a certain trepidation, as the book is a late-career novel that retreads the events of Le Carre’s first break-out hit, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Years after the events in the earlier book, Smiley’s right-hand man Peter Guillam finds himself the focus of a legal investigation into what exactly went down during that mission.

Frankly, the premise struck me as a tired rehash of an earlier success. But this is not a fair assessment of A Legacy of Spies, in which Le Carre cheerfully twists a few knives that he had hitherto left untwisted in the general Smiley saga. As such, this review will feature ( spoilers for all the Smiley books )

Despite my doubts, a perfect end to the series, really. Brings the story full circle, updates us on all the most interesting characters, continues the exploration of Le Carre’s favorite themes. Were we the bad guys? - by “we” meaning not England, or Europe, or the West, but the international brotherhood of spies.

viridian5

Seeing as how I'm not going to chance gimping around cemeteries in a podiatric boot for a while with how uneven the ground can be in places, I decided to post a bunch of photos I haven't yet from past visits to First Calvary Cemetery, most of them from May 2021, as well as a few more from last week. Thus, I have 15 new photos up at my Flickr.

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Anime I'm currently watching:
Oshi no Ko season 2
The Dangers in My Heart [Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu] season 2
2.5 Dimensional Seduction [Nitengo-jigen no Ririsa]
Ao-chan Can't Study [Midara na Ao-chan wa Benkyou ga Dekinai]

I recently finished season one of I Parry Everything: What Do You Mean I'm the Strongest? I'm Not Even an Adventurer Yet!

Current Mood: hot

viridian5

My right leg is killing me today far more than my sprained and fractured left ankle, because of the boot. Lots of new places hurt today as a result of the boot making me move and handle weights differently. Also, parts of my left leg hurt from the top and struts of the boot.

Around the house, I just tight-wrap the foot for compression and use a cane, because that way it's not too heavy for me to elevate it somewhat as I sit. I have the cane from a prior ankle injury.

Current Mood: tired

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I feel that I ought to have something intelligent to say about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but honestly I don’t have a lot to say intelligent or otherwise. Woolf is one of those writers where I respect her skill as a prose stylist, but almost never connect with her work outside of A Room of One’s Own. I thought it might be a fiction/nonfiction thing, where I didn’t vibe with her fiction but liked her nonfiction. But then I read a book of her essays and also wasn’t feeling it, so maybe A Room of One’s Own was just a one-hit wonder for me.

I also finished Alice Alison Lide and Margaret Alison’s Johansen’s Ood-le-Uk the Wanderer, a 1931 Newbery Honor winner written by two sisters. (The Alison sisters are one of three sibling pairs to win Newbery recognition, the others being brother-sister pair Dillwyn and Anne Parrish and brothers James and Christopher Collier.)

Ood-le-Uk is a fifteen-year-old Inuit boy who is swept out to sea on an ice flow, eventually landing in Siberia where he is taken in by the Chukchi and nearly human-sacrificed by the shaman, only to be saved at the last minute by the talisman he wears: a cross in a little wooden box that washed across the sea to his home in Alaska. Does he later meet a Russian Orthodox priest who changes his life by telling him about Christianity? One hundred percent.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve just started an Alice in Wonderland reread, in the copy given to me by my friend Micky, with a note in the front that assures me that the book is just as “chaotic and confusing” as the story my friend Emma and I wrote in sixth grade. It occurs to me that this may not have been a compliment to our magnum opus.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m going in with Fanny Burney’s Evelina.

viridian5

Remember what my roommate said? Ha.

I have a sprain and a fracture. I walked around with no support for two miles on that yesterday before I could get home to ice and tight-wrap it for compression. Just tightened my shoe. It felt like usual low-grade sprain pain to me.

Glad I went to the podiatrist for X-rays today because I thought sensation in my toes was a bit off. I've sprained both ankles so many times I have actually lost count. Sometimes I don't even go to the doctor for it anymore.

I've had my ankles and feet X-rayed many times during a sprain situation, but this is the first time they found something. At the doctor's office I went right to the X-ray machine, without needing directions, from being such a veteran.

(In my near 52 years, this is my second fracture. Never had a full break. My first fracture was when a Volvo door closed on my thumb while I was in high school. That was agonizing. It didn't help that it tore off the fingernail and left a long wound that had to be stitched up.)

Today, I walked around with a big podiatric boot on my left foot for a while, and now my right calf is also killing me for compensating. They gave me a smaller boot this time, so it's a little lighter and it doesn't make life even harder by going all the way up to the bottom of my knee like my original did. Soooo, I have to spend four weeks in the boot.

Current Mood: sore

deemoyza

I think I've figured out what my creative block is. It's a cycle. I really love fanfiction, but right now, my brain wants to focus on original fic only, so it proceeds thusly:

Me: I want to write.
Brain: Okay, but let's do original work for a bit.
Me: Cool, let's go!
Brain: Story's not ready.
Me: What do you mean, not ready? We have notes and character sheets and an outline. It's ready!
Brain: Nope, needs more time.
Me: Fine. Let's poke at some fanfic, then.
Brain: No. Original fic only.

And then it just repeats in an infernal loop.

*heavy sigh*

Current Mood: frustrated

osprey_archer

About a year ago, I realized that some of the older children’s books that I wanted were available in the archive of the university where I work. “If only I knew where the archives were and how to request books there,” I mused, without of course making the faintest effort to acquire this information.

But I have become incrementally better at turning ideas into reality, so it took only a year before I learned where the archives are (the top floor of my favorite library, which incidentally is the library closest to my office) and how to request an appointment to read a book there. Then I traipsed over to the archives for The Little Angel: A Story of Old Rio, illustrated by Katherine Milhous of The Egg Tree, which is the real reason I wanted to read it, although I was also nothing loath to renew the acquaintance with the author, our old friend Alice Dalgliesh of Newbery fame.

The archives are not quite as fancy as the Lilly Library Reading Room: no mural of Great Thinkers in History! But they make up for it with comfy rolling chairs, and the archivists do still bring you your book on a pillow, which is the most important thing.

The book itself is in that particularly mid-twentieth century style where we’re gently drifting through some time in the life of a family long ago and far away. (Sometimes it is just long ago or just faraway, but here it’s both.) We enjoy some street festivals, meet a cute kitten named Gatinho, cheer as the daughter of the house furiously refuses an arranged marriage with a man who just tossed Gatinho across the room (Gatinho is unhurt, except for his dignity), and accept that this is not the kind of book that is ever going to interrogate the fact that this upper-class Brazilian family in the 1820s has slaves. Milhous’s illustrations are charming but not as magical as the illustrations in The Egg Tree or Appolonia’s Valentine.

Nonetheless, pleased by my success, I went back to trawl the library catalog for more books to read in the archives… and discovered they have a copy of one of my remaining Newbery books, Valenti Angelo’s Nino! What a score! So I’ve got an appointment tomorrow at lunch to begin reading.

deemoyza

I started another farm in Stardew Valley recently, and gender-neutral girlies, I get it now. I understand the love for Elliot.

I don't know what's different this go-around, but I think being more familiar with the game lets me spend more time getting to know the villagers, and he truly is charming. (That scene in the pub is precious!) While I intend to keep my farmer an eternal bachelorette, I do not feel like my pomegranates were wasted on him.

I'm sorry I called him Fabio. I'm sorry I called him fake. I was ignorant and blind to his charm. Stardew fans, forgive me, for now I have seen the light!

In other Stardew Valley discoveries, starfruit products make ridiculous profits. My farmer is rich enough for me to feel guilty about it. If only there was a way to build Penny a house without fully upgrading my own first (the final upgrade is waaaay too big for my tastes), I would be completely satisfied.

Current Mood: awake

viridian5

I was dumb enough to tell someone last night that my ankles have been good for over a year. Today, walking to the train for that GEICO doctor appointment, I twisted my left ankle. Since that appointment was such a pain in the ass and was only one hour from that moment, I did all the walking to and from the trains to get there, then did the same back.

It's currently swollen and painful, so I'm RICEing it. I see my podiatrist tomorrow morning. Hope I don't need to go back to the podiatric boot because then I can't bring my own laundry up and down stairs. The boot goes up to my knee, so I have to do stairs carefully step by step while holding on to the railing.

This GEICO appointment was bs. They had me fill out two pages of stuff, wait for an hour, then the actual doctor saw me for three minutes. I could've stayed home and not hurt my ankle.

Roommate: "It must be mostly okay if you could walk on it."
Me: "You'd be amazed what I'm able to walk on."

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Sunday, I stumbled upon Juniper Valley Park's Italian National Day, which I didn't know gets held there annually, and wandered it in search of free food like a hungry stray cat. I waited in a long line for an Italian sausage sandwich, part of that wait being when I finally reached the table and they didn't have any cooked sausage left and I had to wait for them to finish grilling some more. I wonder what the people on line way behind me thought was going on.

Later, I saw a truck near the park for German bratwurst, which supplied the Grill King who made my sandwich. Scandal!

I tried to have my phone Shazam some of the music but it didn't have a clue, and I don't know if it's because some of it was in Italian or because a lot of it was sung to a prerecorded dance track. The electronica backing "Sweet Caroline" was really something.

Alas, I was too old for the bouncy castle-type stuff and the lines were long.

I’m only ¼ Italian and don’t know Italian, but my bits of French and Spanish were enough to let me understand some of the rudimentary stuff the Federazione Italo-Americana of Brooklyn and Queens folks said on the stage.

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Last week while I was driving the streets of Queens I heard loud music. Then a funeral procession pulls up, the front car with its back hatch open to reveal a wall of speakers blasting out that "I'll be missing you" song that's set to "Every Breath You Take." I saw passengers in two cars behind it with their arms out the open windows recording on their cellphones.

Current Mood: annoyed

osprey_archer

In the process of exploring Barbara Cooney’s oeuvre, I discovered that not one but TWO picture book biographies of Cooney were published in 2024: Angela Burke Kunkel’s World More Beautiful: The Life and Art of Barbara Cooney and Sarah Mackenzie’s Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World.

The title of World More Beautiful comes from Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius, in which the main character resolves to see faraway places and make the world more beautiful. The text draws inspiration from Cooney’s own voice, the sort of chanting cadence which you find not only the books she wrote but also in some books she only illustrated, like The Ox-Cart Man and Roxaboxen, whose “amethyst and sea-green” is echoed here in loving color lists: “sapphire and cerulean, azure and ultramarine.”

Becca Stadtlander’s gouache illustrations also echo Cooney’s style, particularly the breath-taking final illustration of Barbara Cooney standing a field of lupines gazing out at the water in her beloved Maine. A gentle and loving tribute to a beloved artist and author.

Then I went on to Sarah Mackenzie’s Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World, illustrated by Eileen Ryan Ewen, who went the opposite approach of making her illustrations not at all like Barbara Cooney’s even when illustrated some of Cooney’s favorite subjects, like lupines and the Maine coast. As I adore Cooney’s illustrations, this was a bit of a letdown at first, but upon reread it grew on me: I like all the little details Ewen wove in, cats and spilled glasses of juice and leaves blowing in the wind alongside ideas.

Also enchanted to discover from this book that Barbara Cooney was “a picnicker of the first water.” Who among us would NOT want to be remembered as such? I really need to raise my picnicking game.

viridian5

It's a quick read that pulls you through it, and it certainly has a lot going on. I appreciated how it dealt with what's seems to be the obligatory for YA love triangle thing. Some of its twists didn't surprise me. The ending made me order the next book, Heavenly Tyrant, from the library to see where things go from there.

While the book's selling point seems to be the giant mecha, the majority of the plot is more about personal and societal politics.

I have a bit of an issue with the book being considered feminist by some people. For all that Zetian (and Iron Widow) talks about the poor girls murdered by Chrysalis piloting and the many horrible ways this society oppresses and mutilates women, almost every single other female character in the book, who are very few in number and don't get much page time, is an antagonist for Zetian, someone brainwashed by their society and thus against her one way or another. (Which makes one ask how Zetian alone is so different. She's just Not Like the Other Girls.) She's self-righteous but is she really fighting to make things better for anyone other than herself and the few people she deems worthy? ( spoiler ) For all I know, this might be the author's point about Zetian and we just haven't gotten there yet.

I found Li Shimin interesting. ( spoiler ) I do not trust Yizhi--he seems too good to be true for me, especially considering all the lying and betraying almost everyone does around Zetian--but I guess I'll have to wait to see if I'm right on that.

There was a thing in the text that stopped me dead: ( spoiler ) Maybe the author is trying to get at that, but "vacancy" is not it. Maybe it's meant to be something like "intensity"?

This edition is several printings in, so it's not a first pass thing either. It seriously stopped my reading flow dead for a while.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: "Once Again" by Days of the New

viridian5

I posted a ton of photos at my Flickr since the last time I mentioned here. While Bergdorf Goodman hasn't put anything new since then, I have new Bloomingdale's and Saks Fifth Avenue window display shots up. (By the way, despite posturing by the Trump administration, Congestion Pricing is still going on.)

I've also done some cemetery shooting since then, this time at (Lutheran) All Faiths and First Calvary. When I last checked, Irving still hasn't been stood back up. For First Calvary, I was there Memorial Day, which was part of why I took some photos of their Civil War veterans' memorial. It was dedicated in 1866, and it looks like the city hasn't bothered to fix anything at the site since the last refurbishment I heard took place in the 1920s. (The memorial is supposed to be cared for by the New York Parks Department.)

There are some monuments I looked for but unfortunately couldn't find. The last time I shot them I had my Kodak digital camera that didn't do geotagged information, and First Calvary Cemetery is huge. Specifically, these two: ( photos )

As you see, they're nowhere near the roads and require quite a hike into... somewhere.

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We've been having a lot of rain here lately. As I drove into Long Island Friday, I saw a double rainbow overhead.

The back brake light alert hasn't come on in my car's dashboard in weeks. I have no idea what's up with that.

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At some point I have to use "You're just a sad song with nothing to say" from My Chemical Romance's "Disenchanted" for a fic.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: "Disenchanted" by My Chemical Romance

netgirl_y2k

I'm trying to post here more. Sorry about that.

So I finished the second season of The Last of Us, a season of television that was...fine. There wasn't a single outright bad episode; there also wasn't an out and out banger like the Bill and Frank episode from S1, where it felt like they'd remembered that this was a television show and not a video game and took advantage of that. If anything, I thought it hewed too close to the game. And I say this as someone who liked the game - and by 'liked' I mean I played it to credits, broadly enjoyed the experience, and didn't go immediately insane and spend the next five years screaming into a front facing iPhone camera like a total weirdo.

And there were a few things that I thought the show did better than the game. The first was the attack on Jackson, which I though was pretty epic set piece. The second was Eugene's fate, in the game he's just an old guy who likes weed and has died of a stroke, here he serves as a neat bit of unflattering characterisation for both how cold Joel can be and how selfish Ellie can be, and marks the real beginning of their relationship breakdown. The third was Jesse, who is the very definition of an npc in the game, he has no strong feelings about his girlfriend dumping him for Ellie, about becoming a father, or being trapped in a war zone right up until he gets shot in the face, something he would presumably also be nonplussed about. I appreciated that the show let him be furious at Ellie the entire time he was in Seattle, and I thought it was kind of a cop out to have them make up immediately before the aforementioned face shooting.

But the main thing I thought the show did better than the game was the Ellie/Dina relationship. I really wanted to like it, too - it was a big triple A game with central f/f relationship - but the pregnancy plot twist was one of the spoilers that got leaked, and I was immediately so cross that I forgot to care that Joel died. I hate the 'unknowingly pregnant when they get together' storyline that was for a while endemic in f/f stories so much; I think I would hate it a lot less if even 5% of the time it ended in 'Look, I like you, but this relationship is a minute and a half old, and I don't want to be a parent' but, nope, it was always insta family.

I feel like I should clarify, because when I was talking about Andor I was kvetching about the Bix pregnancy storyline too, and, like, I like kids, I enjoy spending time around them - even right now, when my friend's kids are exclusively communicating in lines from the Minecraft movie - but, by God, I am a hard sell for stories about pregnancy.

Anyway, I liked the Ellie/Dina relationship a lot more on the show. The actress who played Dina was probably the MVP of the season, the actors had great chemistry, and I really liked the change where it was Dina who was with Joel when he ran into Abby's crew, it gave her a reason to go with Ellie to Seattle other than just because she's the love interest. Changing the speed at which Ellie and Dina's relationship developed so that they didn't properly get together until after they both knew Dina was pregnant changed that story from one I hated to one I merely disliked. I actually kinda liked Ellie's 'I'm gonna be a dad' line, both because I thought it was a cool line, and for Bella Ramsey's delivery, but it didn't solve the underlying problem for me, that show!Ellie, even more than Ellie from the games, does not seem like someone who wants to be a parent at nineteen or would be in any way good at it.

I badly wanted to be proved wrong, but I still think Kaitlyn Deaver has been horribly miscast. And, like, I don't want to slight her, she's been excellent in pretty much everything else i've seen her in, but her casting as Abby only makes sense to me if I assume she was slotted in as Abby after ageing out of playing Ellie (presumably without auditioning anyone else for Abby.)

The pacing was also weird as balls. Seven is an odd number of episodes, and if you're determined to keep the main character switch, why not just do one season of 12/14 episodes? You could even have a hiatus over the summer if you wanted to differentiate them.

The switch to Abby's perspective on the same three days, something that barely worked in the game, if that, given how divisive it was, is not something that is going to work when the show comes back in 18-24 months. And it feels like at least someone involved knew that, which is why the big emotional beats of the back half of the game (why Abby killed Joel/that Joel and Ellie were trying to patch things up) got moved up, because who's going to remember and/or care in two years?

What else? Let's see.

The converse of it all. I understand that Ellie, not unlike myself, is trapped in the terrible fashion choices of 2003, but trainers with no grip, no ankle support, and which rot if you get them wet are a terrible choice of footwear if your day job is fighting zombies in the snow.

Also, the amount of abuse that got thrown Ramsey's way, and HBO's lack of any kind of a response does not bode well for what, if any, safeguarding measures are being taken to protect the kids in the misbegotten HP reboot. God, that show is so fucked...

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The Book of Daniel Vol. 2

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