recent happiness
Jul. 7th, 2014 03:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaks-- I was initially skeptical when the city of Boston bumped its fireworks a day early on no notice due to weather forecasts, and then even more confused when the show itself started more than twenty minutes before schedule. But then, when sovay and gaudior and jinian (jinian is local now yay my girlfriend living in town yay) and derspatchel and I were walking back from the hill nearby where we watch it, fwoosh. That is an approximation of the actual sound effect. I have been out in harder rain, but never in any that came on so suddenly. It went from completely dry to 'is there even air in this water' in .5 seconds. So we got to see the show without any hitches, as opposed to the terrible year when we got shooed off the Esplanade and later allowed back and all was chaos, and then we also got some of the most spectacular weather it has been my privilege to see in this city.
-- did I mentionjinian is local that is pretty boss
-- This has been going on for long enough now that my impostor syndrome is dying down, so I may as well mention that I have been reviewing books lately for Publisher's Weekly. They practice strict anonymity (reviewers get their names in a list of contributors, but we aren't allowed to say what we actually reviewed), so I can't link you to the reviews, but that is a job that I have now. It is fun and I think it is good for my writing, because one has to cram a great deal of information into a very small wordcount, and so I have been forced to hyperfocus on my own ambiguities, loose prose, grammatical peculiarities &c. I certainly continue to indulge some of these things elsewhere, but I am far more deeply aware of what they are.
-- If I did not have a terrible cold, I would have finished writing this novel by now. Wait, I am trying to accentuate the positive. I am so close to draft oh god oh god oh god I hate being ill.
-- I was feeling so sick and tired and brain-drained and generally lousy yesterday that I watched The Fifth Element on Netflix, because sometimes one wants a Big Dumb Movie. And it was really dumb! The script had so many holes in the first scene alone that I seriously considered putting the whole thing on mute with no subtitles and just watching the scenery. But the design was all amazing, and the worldbuilding was really lived in and solid and had this grimy retro-future-of-the-nineties feel that was enjoyable. And, and this is genuinely great, it was the least white future I have seen in that sort of movie. Background characters are PoC, foreground characters are PoC, people in authority, people not in authority, heroes, villains, people just trying to do their jobs, competent people, not-so-competent people, all of these are PoC and it was so amazingly relaxing. There were about 2.3 egregious instances of sexism, but apart from that, it was a really painless experience as far as that sort of Big Dumb Movie goes. Also, I am happy that the hero has all of Viz's mid-nineties English-language manga titles stacked on a table in his apartment. It's blink-and-you'll-miss-it set-dressing, but it was so pleasantly nostalgic.
-- Have finally gotten around to rewatching/finishing Mawaru Penguindrum after several years, which is nice. I watched a chunk of it initially with Thrud in Florence, Italy, clutching each other and whimpering at the things it was doing with and to Rose of Versailles, and then when I got back to the States I started showing the beginning to various people, and not all of it was out yet, and the end result was that I snagged in the middle. I have not yet gotten as far as I did the first time, so the director is still setting up the ways in which he is fucking with the audience and the genre on a metafictional level, as opposed, mostly, to enacting them. Which is to say I've gotten as far as IKUHARA WHAT ARE YOU DOING and not as far as HOW DID THEY GIVE YOU ANY MONEY FOR THIS THIS IS THE LEAST COMMERCIAL SHOW EVER MADE. Thoroughly enjoying it.
And I think that's about where things are at the moment.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
sovay and gaudior and jinian (jinian is local now yay my girlfriend living in town yay) and derspatchel and I were walking back from the hill nearby where we watch it, fwoosh. That is an approximation of the actual sound effect. I have been out in harder rain, but never in any that came on so suddenly. It went from completely dry to 'is there even air in this water' in .5 seconds. So we got to see the show without any hitches, as opposed to the terrible year when we got shooed off the Esplanade and later allowed back and all was chaos, and then we also got some of the most spectacular weather it has been my privilege to see in this city. -- did I mention
jinian is local that is pretty boss-- This has been going on for long enough now that my impostor syndrome is dying down, so I may as well mention that I have been reviewing books lately for Publisher's Weekly. They practice strict anonymity (reviewers get their names in a list of contributors, but we aren't allowed to say what we actually reviewed), so I can't link you to the reviews, but that is a job that I have now. It is fun and I think it is good for my writing, because one has to cram a great deal of information into a very small wordcount, and so I have been forced to hyperfocus on my own ambiguities, loose prose, grammatical peculiarities &c. I certainly continue to indulge some of these things elsewhere, but I am far more deeply aware of what they are.
-- If I did not have a terrible cold, I would have finished writing this novel by now. Wait, I am trying to accentuate the positive. I am so close to draft oh god oh god oh god I hate being ill.
-- I was feeling so sick and tired and brain-drained and generally lousy yesterday that I watched The Fifth Element on Netflix, because sometimes one wants a Big Dumb Movie. And it was really dumb! The script had so many holes in the first scene alone that I seriously considered putting the whole thing on mute with no subtitles and just watching the scenery. But the design was all amazing, and the worldbuilding was really lived in and solid and had this grimy retro-future-of-the-nineties feel that was enjoyable. And, and this is genuinely great, it was the least white future I have seen in that sort of movie. Background characters are PoC, foreground characters are PoC, people in authority, people not in authority, heroes, villains, people just trying to do their jobs, competent people, not-so-competent people, all of these are PoC and it was so amazingly relaxing. There were about 2.3 egregious instances of sexism, but apart from that, it was a really painless experience as far as that sort of Big Dumb Movie goes. Also, I am happy that the hero has all of Viz's mid-nineties English-language manga titles stacked on a table in his apartment. It's blink-and-you'll-miss-it set-dressing, but it was so pleasantly nostalgic.
-- Have finally gotten around to rewatching/finishing Mawaru Penguindrum after several years, which is nice. I watched a chunk of it initially with Thrud in Florence, Italy, clutching each other and whimpering at the things it was doing with and to Rose of Versailles, and then when I got back to the States I started showing the beginning to various people, and not all of it was out yet, and the end result was that I snagged in the middle. I have not yet gotten as far as I did the first time, so the director is still setting up the ways in which he is fucking with the audience and the genre on a metafictional level, as opposed, mostly, to enacting them. Which is to say I've gotten as far as IKUHARA WHAT ARE YOU DOING and not as far as HOW DID THEY GIVE YOU ANY MONEY FOR THIS THIS IS THE LEAST COMMERCIAL SHOW EVER MADE. Thoroughly enjoying it.
And I think that's about where things are at the moment.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
