| (no subject) |
[Jan. 3rd, 2010|04:44 pm] |
Chapter 13 of the Founderfic is posted at:
FanFiction.Net
Skyehawke
LiveJournal
The Archive of Our Own
Also, if I haven't linked you to it already, there's a Harry Potter genfic fanzine in the works. Go here and here to read about it -- and, if you're interested, comment!
(![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) thinkatory, that means you too.)
ANYWAY. I really like this chapter, because I think it shows Helga and Rowena's friendship well -- which is odd, I guess, because they're angry at each other in it. But when they argue, it's mostly because each cares too much about the other to let her be wrong. Also, it's kind of fun to write Godric and Rowena trying to plan around Salazar's planning, because they're trying to take into account that Salazar planned for them planning around his planning, and it's just not their strongest point.
Also, I think the next three chapters are some of my favorites so far. Because there is a PARTY. |
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| Did Someone Tamper with Voting Machines to Create Fraudulent Votes for Prop 8? |
[Jan. 3rd, 2010|03:55 am] |
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| |  interested | ] |
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| | sleeping dog noises | ] |
The Election Defense Alliance says yes: someone altered the Prop 8 votes from Los Angeles County, which comprised 24.23% of the statewide electorate, by enough to account for a majority of the statewide margin of victory.
If true, this means that if we could stop voting machine fraud, the number of voters whose minds we would need to change to repeal Prop 8 by popular vote would be much, much smaller than we've believed until now.
It also means that someone in Los Angeles County is evil, but I think that's much preferable to a whole bunch more people in Los Angeles County being evil. |
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| Up in the Air, Sherlock Holmes, holiday recap |
[Dec. 31st, 2009|06:58 am] |
I keep intending to update this journal more comprehensively, and yet never quite getting around to it. The corners of my mind are crowded with half-constructed, time-discarded malformed little lj-entry ideas that were never allowed to develop. They scritch with their little fingernails at me from the darkness, reminding me that I promised myself I'd get around to them someday, but never have. I have too many of them at this point to be able to catch up, so I take myself away and wait for them to die off, and say "maybe later..."
That said, I've been at home in Maryland for the holidays over the last week, and since Christmas season seems to have become Official Watch Movies As A Family season instead, we have been keeping up and doing our part. Christmas Day we saw "Up In The Air," which I rather liked. I am not always so fond of George Clooney, but he worked well for me here--it may also have helped that I had zero expectations before seeing the movie. It was one of those film without a plot arc per se, but more of a film about watching characters live. When I was trying to digest it afterward, it occurred to me that these kinds of films feel more like modern novels. I'm used to novel just being about a character or a situation, but I still expect movies to be more plot-driven somehow.
Anyway, my mother, when I asked her opinion on it, remarked "but it was really very typical though, wasn't it? A cynical, jaded man who we end up learning is really a good guy at heart." My sister said she thought it was typical in another way, in that it was another movie about the importance of human connections in giving life meaning. But I really don't think it was really about either of those things.
For one, I didn't feel that Clooney's character was so much cynical as emotionally crippled, and it was obvious he was a "good guy at heart" in the first 10 minutes or so. Plus except for the intro, he didn't have the arrogance of the usual cynical-bastard types: he seemed to recognize his own emotional limitations quite well, and just wish to be left alone to deal with his life as best he could in accordance with those limitations. True, he traveled the country giving lectures on how others could be more like him, but again, after the first 10 minutes everything he said seemed for the benefit of convincing himself rather than his audience, and thus the cracks in his emotional armor were visible too early on for that to be a main concern of the movie.
This may have been a flaw of the movie--I never could understand what his lectures were leading up to, and how he could possibly leave the audience motivated or even remotely convinced to follow his example, from the snippets of the talks that we were shown.
As far as emotional connections--certainly, his character followed the expected arc of seeing more value in interpersonal connections than he previously maintained they deserved, but it wasn't as clear-cut as that. Another character's life was shown to have been compromised precisely because she placed too much value on interpersonal connections, and the ending as a whole was not definitive.
No, I think the movie was pretty much about its title--about what happens to people when they realize that the certainties they had organized their lives around turn out to not be so certain after all, and how one deals with the crumbling of those foundations. And some people pick up, move on, and find that the temporary destabilization of everything they thought they could count on was in fact good for them, and they go on to build new, better foundations... and others don't.
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"Sherlock Holmes" was obviously a very different kind of movie. Although Robert Downey Jr looks nothing like the character, and doesn't remotely have the Doyle-Holmes aura, considering this was very plainly a Hollywood-does-steampunk version of Sherlock Holmes, I did not even try to look for accuracy. After all, steampunk is meant to be a reimagining. Plus I was excited to see what RDJr could bring to the role. I did not mind that his scruffy take on Holmes had very little to do with Holmes' characteristic acerbic calm (which people and some movie versions have sometimes interpreted as stuffyness, but is really nothing of the kind), but I was a bit disappointed that he really didn't do all that much more with it. Oftentimes I felt like I was just watching RDJr's impression of Dr.House-as-Holmes. House is obviously inspired by Holmes, but a thoroughly modern character based off Holmes and Holmes reimagined in a modern fashion should still be different. Updated or not, Holmes is still a man of the 19th century, and there are some things that don't suit him as they would a contemporary Holmes-based character.
Specifically, I wish they had made him more chivalrous. Holmes wasn't entirely comfortable with women, and he wasn't given to humoring anyone, but he still followed some of the basic rules of politeness. House being crude towards women makes sense, Holmes... not so much. The scene at the restaurant with him and Watson's fiancee just felt "off" to me because I really think it was very un-Holmes-like (more so than him swinging off chains or engaging in bare-knuckle fighting for fun).
Jude Law was the one who really impressed me. I thought his Watson was terrific. He both rang true for me as the Watson I read about, and as an updated take on him, so that he was both quite new and unique and yet still very very Watson.
I did like the relationship between Watson and Holmes. My sister was said that there was not nearly as much homoeroticism as she was promised, and I gotta say... yeah, there really wasn't much. But there was also no overcompensation or denial of possible homoeroticism, and thus it just worked and had a relaxed, comfortable amiability. And you know, that's pretty rare by itself--a close relationship between men that neither represses nor over-emphasizes the possibility of sexual attraction, but rather seems to not worry about it at all. Maybe it's there, maybe not, Holmes and Watson don't seem to care. I'm all for that.
A funny thing was that in some ways their relationship (as portrayed in movies) was reversed, since Law's Watson was the generally-calm one rather than the excitable bumbling one, and Downey's Holmes was the twitchy one. Heh.
Oh! I also really liked what they did with Irene Adler. It's always difficult to introduce a woman into a male-male partnership, but they wrote her so that she was neither just the Throw-Away Romantic Interest nor a distracting third wheel that came between the two men. She pulled her own weight (as a character--was not that fond of Rachel McAdam's acting, honestly), and was an entirely valid companion, so that she and Holmes and Watson formed a functional triad, no member of which threatened another member's standing. The film also did not try to make more of Holmes' romance with her than it should have--on either of their parts, and that was good. It was spiked up a little bit from the books of course, but overall I was happy with how their relationship was represented.
However, the movie as a whole was merely "enjoyable." I know they're gunning for a franchise, but I don't think this was strong enough to carry one off. There's a chance that a sequel might in fact be better, having this first movie to build off, but it also has a much more likely chance of being very much not worth it. And if it's only as good as this movie was, I would say it won't be worth it. |
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| 2009 Gardening Retrospective |
[Dec. 29th, 2009|05:07 pm] |
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| |  accomplished | ] |
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| | fish tank filter | ] |
2009 was the first year in which I gardened throughout all four seasons. Last year I wrote a 2008 Gardening Retrospective which documented rather more failures than successes, but 2009 was a more successful gardening year.
Let's start with the before and after photos! Here is my garden at the end of December 2008:
And here is the same view of my garden today:
It's still far from being the garden of my dreams, but I do think it's a definite improvement. At least this time you can sort of guess from the sight of the yard that someone might be making some degree of effort here. And this is December, after all, so I can't reasonably expect it to look like May. I see three categories of improvement:- The yard is no longer almost entirely underwater - it had rained about equally recently in both these photos, but the drainage ditch I dug in early 2009 greatly improved the dispersal of water and stopped most of my plants from drowning. I don't think I'm going to lose any plants to drowning this winter except the white sage, which isn't native here and therefore can't reasonably be provided for.
- I'm having far more success controlling the annual bluegrass this winter. This is because last year I didn't live here yet and only visited on weekends, whereas this year I do live here and also happen to be unemployed, which gives me plenty of time for weeding.
- There are taller plants growing. More of them, really, than you can see from the picture; December makes a lot of deciduous plants invisible.
And I see four categories that need further work:- There's way too much bare dirt. This is hard to fix, because the dogs trample all low-growing non-weed plants to death except when the low-growing plants are within about six inches of a taller object, such as a shrub or a large rock or the house. So before I can turn any area of ground green, I have to first protect it with rocks or shrubs or something to deter the dogs from running through it at top speed. (Also, I haven't necessarily found a good low-growing perennial plant that's especially happy here to cover large areas of ground with. My springbank clover and clustered field sedge both seem like they could be good options, but neither can stand up to onslaughts of bermuda grass, so I have to make sure the bermuda grass is fully controlled before I can hope to get the clover or sedge well established.)
- Closely related to the above, I need to define clearer walking paths - paths to direct the dogs onto as well as to use ourselves. I have the beginning of a path on the left side of the drainage ditch, and a rudimentary dog-trampled path around the entire perimeter of the yard. But path next to the drainage ditch sort of dead-ends in the middle of the yard - as does the drainage ditch itself - and it probably shouldn't.
- Where does my mulch keep disappearing to? I've dumped a ton of woodchip mulch on this yard, and it all just vanishes within a few months. I'm sure the dirt is better drained as a result of having eaten up all that woodchip mulch, but I'd really like to have some mulch actually remain on top of the ground.
- I don't think I really much like the look of deergrasses. I want to like them, because they've generally been pretty easy to grow, and they look wonderful when I see them in other people's photographs, and occasionally even in a few of my own photographs, when they're green. But I don't really like their flower stalks, and I especially don't like the fact that right now, they've all turned mostly brown.
( Further notes on gardening in 2009, mostly for my own benefit ) |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 26th, 2009|09:29 pm] |
Just happened to catch End of Time on BBC America.
...
SO NOT COMFORTABLE WITH THIS.
::brain cramp:: |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 26th, 2009|03:02 pm] |
Chapter 12 of my Founderfic is up at:
FanFiction.Net
Skyhawke
LiveJournal
The Archive of Our Own
I have nothing particularly fascinating to talk about regarding the fic itself, but yesterday I received a new Amazon Kindle. It's very nice to read on (very Star Trek), and I think I will start creating Kindle-compatible files of my to-read backlog, for the commute to/from school. So, a few questions:
Would anyone else be interested in reading my fics on the Kindle?
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to do this? I think I can use Stanza to do it, but if there are any methods you have, I'm curious.
Also, give me author/book recs! Fiction, nonfiction, whatever, as long as it's text. Not everything's available on Kindle, but the author might have other work that is.
AND FINALLY, unrelated to my other questions, I also got the three Zoombinis games for Christmas. The first one was my FAVORITE as a kid, and it keeps shutting itself down running in XP, with various (weird) error messages that don't seem to follow any sort of pattern. I've googled around and found no working solutions, so if you have any information or suggestions, or know of any place I might be able to find help with getting it to work, please point me there. |
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| Christmas Loot |
[Dec. 25th, 2009|11:57 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | gifts | ] |
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| |  festive | ] |
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| | smoke alarm | ] |
For Christmas, Santa Susan Claus brought me a wheelbarrow! It is big and red. Santa Susan Claus tried to assemble it for me, but didn't get very far. I said that this was only to be expected, since Santa never seemed to get far in pre-assembling things when I was a little kid either.
Christmas actually almost got canceled this year in our household. For Susan it sort of was canceled. I had a fever of 101.7 yesterday and barely got out of bed all day, so I called my parents to say I didn't think we'd be coming for Christmas. I asked Susan whether she might want to go without me, but she's been getting over a bad cold herself and barely managed to summon the energy to buy and wrap a lot of my presents at the last moment on Christmas Eve. Today I felt surprisingly less sick and didn't have a fever anymore, so I called my parents again and said that I would be coming after all. But Susan felt worse and didn't come with me. Also, we're canceling our plans to drive to Los Angeles and visit her sisters, because neither of us is feeling healthy enough to handle the long trip. I was pretty miserable a lot of the time at my parents' house tonight, because I'm still sick, but I did want to have a Christmas of some sort, and it was clear that wasn't going to happen at home since Susan couldn't get out of bed at all.
I saw the wheelbarrow before I left because it wasn't wrapped, but I didn't open any of my wrapped presents from Susan until I got home in the evening, because Susan wasn't awake to see me open them earlier. Here are the books I received:- Isabel Allende: The House of the Spirits (from my parents)
- Ivo Andric: The Bridge on the Drina (from my parents)
- Octavia E. Butler: Parable of the Sower (from my parents)
- Steven L. Evans: Top Trails Sacramento: Exploring Valley, Foothills, and Mountains in the Sacramento Region (from my parents)
- Peter Høeg: The Woman and the Ape (from Susan's sister Wendy)
- Glenn Keator: California Plant Families: West of the Sierran Crest and Deserts (from my parents)
- Matthew Lewis: The Monk (from my brother)
- Naguib Mahfouz: The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street (from my parents)
- Sara Stein: My Weeds: A Gardener's Botany (from my parents)
- Brian Tom, Lawrence Tom, and the Chinese American Museum of Northern California: Images of America: Marysville's Chinatown (from my parents)
- Amos Tutuola: The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (from Susan)
And here are the CDs I received (all from my parents):- Dave Gahan: Hourglass
- Morrissey: Swords
- Placebo: Battle for the Sun
- U2: No Line on the Horizon
I gave my mother a Massive Attack CD, which she had requested because they did the theme song for the TV show House. I told her I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to say that I had given my mother an "ambient trip-hop" CD for Christmas, because that was how I saw Massive Attack's musical genre described online. Meanwhile, my mother gave Susan the Beatles' Abbey Road album, and Susan finds it amusing that she received the Beatles CD while my mother received the Massive Attack CD.
I also received lots of seeds--I wonder whether there's still time to plant some of them this year? I'm sure I'll save a lot of them for next fall, but probably not all of them. Here they are:- Western Yarrow (Achillea millefolium var. occidentalis) (from my parents)
- Dill (Anethum graveolens) (from Susan's sister Wendy)
- Chinese Houses (Collinsia heterophylla) (from my parents)
- Echinacea (Echinacea purpurea) (from Susan's sister Wendy)
- California Poppy (Eschscholzia californica) (from Susan's sister Wendy)
- Globe Gilia (Gilia capitata) (from my parents)
- Bird's Eyes (Gilia tricolor) (from Susan)
- Tidy-tips (Layia platyglossa) (from my parents)
- Blue Flax (Linum lewisii) (from Susan)
- Sky Lupine (Lupinus nanus) (from Susan)
- Arroyo Lupine (Lupinus succulentus) (from my parents)
- Chamomile (Matricaria recutita) (from Susan's sister Wendy)
- Baby Blue Eyes (Nemophila menziesii) (from my parents)
- Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) (from Susan's sister Wendy)
And I received a David Bowie Plastic Soul Review DVD from Susan, garden clippers from Susan, a set of five garden stepping stones from Susan, purple gloves from Susan, a pink skirt from Susan, a teal skirt from my parents, a pair of matching Christmas dishtowels for Susan and me from my Aunt Kitty, two baskets containing three cans of gourmet cocoa for both of us from my Aunt Kitty, and a whole box of neat little items like pens and colored pencils binder clips and magnets and stickers and chapstick and a mirror and a car "glove-mop" and candy and so on for both of us from Susan's sister Wendy.
It was an excellent haul. And now I'm going to bed, hoping we both won't be sick anymore when we wake up tomorrow morning. |
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| Captain America and the Meaning of Christmas. |
[Dec. 26th, 2009|12:58 am] |
Has it actually been more than three years since I last made a non-administrative post to scans_daily? Whoa. Come to think, has it actually been three years since I became a mod? Save me!
Anyway, I figured it was high time I got around to posting that Marvel Team-Up holiday story I keep not posting in time for Christmas. Shut up, I totally made it this year.
Starring: Spider-Man, Uatu the Watcher, and a Christmas-spirit-speechifying cameo from the man himself, Captain America! One of my favorite issues, as it combines a heartwarming seasonal story with, if you stop to think about it, complete and utter CRACK. Do enjoy. |
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