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damkiannaSo, I missed out on ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
cliche_bingo this time around. I can't decide whether I'm rueful or relieved; mostly, I'm cursing my own brain, and the doc full of snippets of Hellboy fic that just looking at the list of clichés had me writing. :D It would have been nice to have actually been obligated by outside forces to post something; maybe then I'd actually finish something that's not an AU/rewrite.
Hellboy movieverse is one of those fandoms I wish were bigger - I genuinely liked the first movie, and I loved the bits of worldbuilding in the second one, even though the writing and plotting and pacing were not nearly as tight. (Also, I found Nuada and Nuala's deaths kind of annoying. I was hoping that Nuala would jump in and start fighting with Nuada - with the twin-brain link thing they had, obviously she must be just as good at fighting as he is. Neither of them would be able to kill the other without killing themselves; I could've been convinced to go for two-immortals-locked-in-battle-for-eternity, or the possibility that with enough time, Nuala could have talked Nuada down (especially given the whole not-evil-just-misunderstood angle that the movie seemed to be pushing). Nuala deciding to kill herself instead was both a little anti-climactic and sort of frustrating. Plus, I missed Myers.)
Anyway.
My dad is an incredibly difficult person to buy gifts for. He has fully embraced the internet, and the online shopping that goes with it, and the vast majority of the things he wants? He buys for himself. :P Sometimes he keeps his wishlist on Amazon well-updated, but not always.
He has a big thing for what he thinks of as new and unusual concepts in fiction - for example, last month he was on something of a Tamora Pierce kick. To me, a fair number of the ideas put forward in Tamora Pierce's books do not seem hugely unusual, partly because I read them over and over for about six years in late elementary school and middle school, and partly because they are not the only fantasy stories about teenage girls that I've ever read; to my dad, though, they are brilliantly original and interesting, because ... before them he had not read all that many books aimed toward teenage girls.
I had China Miéville recommended to me by somebody as a writer of unusual and particularly original fantasy books, that were not swords-and-sorcery retreads. So I bought one for my dad! \o/ Present accomplished.
The cake was less successful, at least initially; my mother sent me to go pick one up from the bakery that she had already ordered, except ... there wasn't one. I don't know which step of the ordering process failed her, but. So I drove home and told her, and she managed to whip one up with a recipe that didn't use any eggs, since we only had one, and the small amount of icing we still had lying around.
Sadly, the singing of Happy Birthday was not successful at all. My dad is a singer, and a very good one; I am also a singer, less talented but capable of holding a tune, at a bare minimum. My mother ... can manage, but she's not good at jumps. She can handle the first two lines of the song, but on the jump in the third line from "happy" to "birthday", she basically needs someone to push on her stomach, or she goes ludicrously flat. And my sister couldn't carry a tune if it had a handle on it; she's so tonedeaf that she had trouble learning how to drive stickshift because she couldn't tell when the engine's pitch was rising enough to indicate a need to shift.
Usually it works out okay, I can hold the tune well enough to give my mom something to follow. It's not pretty, but we get through it. This time? My mother didn't even make it to her usual trouble spot before sliding off the melody so badly that I couldn't help but laugh, and after that it was all over. :D
Between presents and cake, though, we went to go see the movie Up; I'd already seen it, but my parents hadn't, and it's not like I minded seeing it again. I heart Russell and Carl so hard, and Ellie is one of my favorite characters ever. I ... don't really have any meta to generate about it, I'm just a big ball of squee.
On Sunday, I went over to Q's house, together with J, M, K, and ... Ka, let's say. (Ka is not my favorite person in the entire world - some of her attitudes about men rub me the wrong way - but she was friends with J, M, K, and Q for years before I came along, and I'm pretty sure I'd count her as my friend, too.) We made dumplings for lunch with Q's mom while Q's little brother, Z, watched some kind of children's movie/educational documentary on Genghis Khan in Chinese. (Q's whole family speaks both English and Chinese, including Z, who's maybe four or five.)
After we ate, we basically played Taboo together for about three hours. We have maybe a little too much fun playing that game. :D We also watched the New Moon trailer - we went to see Twilight together, and had a great time mocking it - and I introduced them all to the word "fursplosion". I also told them about the Buffy meets Edward vid I found through the Sparklefield the other day.
Monday was pretty uninteresting - a few more encounters with wildlife, including a chipmunk and a baby bird in Mary's garden. There's a groundhog (at least one) living at the base of my road; I saw it again, too.
Yesterday, man - speaking of Hellboy, I had the Samael of flies on my back all day. Usually, an insect has to have a certain spindliness to it for me to be comfortable killing it; mosquitoes, for example. Flies, I can't usually bear to smash - but I made an exception yesterday. And I swear, for every fly I killed, I ended up with two more buzzing around. Ugh.
I'm taking today "off" - which is to say, off from weeding for Mary; I still have to vacuum the house for my mother, and go to the post office, and do some fun coordinatey-type things for my thesis. Which, I should probably get started. :D
cliche_bingo this time around. I can't decide whether I'm rueful or relieved; mostly, I'm cursing my own brain, and the doc full of snippets of Hellboy fic that just looking at the list of clichés had me writing. :D It would have been nice to have actually been obligated by outside forces to post something; maybe then I'd actually finish something that's not an AU/rewrite.Hellboy movieverse is one of those fandoms I wish were bigger - I genuinely liked the first movie, and I loved the bits of worldbuilding in the second one, even though the writing and plotting and pacing were not nearly as tight. (Also, I found Nuada and Nuala's deaths kind of annoying. I was hoping that Nuala would jump in and start fighting with Nuada - with the twin-brain link thing they had, obviously she must be just as good at fighting as he is. Neither of them would be able to kill the other without killing themselves; I could've been convinced to go for two-immortals-locked-in-battle-for-eternity, or the possibility that with enough time, Nuala could have talked Nuada down (especially given the whole not-evil-just-misunderstood angle that the movie seemed to be pushing). Nuala deciding to kill herself instead was both a little anti-climactic and sort of frustrating. Plus, I missed Myers.)
Anyway.
My dad is an incredibly difficult person to buy gifts for. He has fully embraced the internet, and the online shopping that goes with it, and the vast majority of the things he wants? He buys for himself. :P Sometimes he keeps his wishlist on Amazon well-updated, but not always.
He has a big thing for what he thinks of as new and unusual concepts in fiction - for example, last month he was on something of a Tamora Pierce kick. To me, a fair number of the ideas put forward in Tamora Pierce's books do not seem hugely unusual, partly because I read them over and over for about six years in late elementary school and middle school, and partly because they are not the only fantasy stories about teenage girls that I've ever read; to my dad, though, they are brilliantly original and interesting, because ... before them he had not read all that many books aimed toward teenage girls.
I had China Miéville recommended to me by somebody as a writer of unusual and particularly original fantasy books, that were not swords-and-sorcery retreads. So I bought one for my dad! \o/ Present accomplished.
The cake was less successful, at least initially; my mother sent me to go pick one up from the bakery that she had already ordered, except ... there wasn't one. I don't know which step of the ordering process failed her, but. So I drove home and told her, and she managed to whip one up with a recipe that didn't use any eggs, since we only had one, and the small amount of icing we still had lying around.
Sadly, the singing of Happy Birthday was not successful at all. My dad is a singer, and a very good one; I am also a singer, less talented but capable of holding a tune, at a bare minimum. My mother ... can manage, but she's not good at jumps. She can handle the first two lines of the song, but on the jump in the third line from "happy" to "birthday", she basically needs someone to push on her stomach, or she goes ludicrously flat. And my sister couldn't carry a tune if it had a handle on it; she's so tonedeaf that she had trouble learning how to drive stickshift because she couldn't tell when the engine's pitch was rising enough to indicate a need to shift.
Usually it works out okay, I can hold the tune well enough to give my mom something to follow. It's not pretty, but we get through it. This time? My mother didn't even make it to her usual trouble spot before sliding off the melody so badly that I couldn't help but laugh, and after that it was all over. :D
Between presents and cake, though, we went to go see the movie Up; I'd already seen it, but my parents hadn't, and it's not like I minded seeing it again. I heart Russell and Carl so hard, and Ellie is one of my favorite characters ever. I ... don't really have any meta to generate about it, I'm just a big ball of squee.
On Sunday, I went over to Q's house, together with J, M, K, and ... Ka, let's say. (Ka is not my favorite person in the entire world - some of her attitudes about men rub me the wrong way - but she was friends with J, M, K, and Q for years before I came along, and I'm pretty sure I'd count her as my friend, too.) We made dumplings for lunch with Q's mom while Q's little brother, Z, watched some kind of children's movie/educational documentary on Genghis Khan in Chinese. (Q's whole family speaks both English and Chinese, including Z, who's maybe four or five.)
After we ate, we basically played Taboo together for about three hours. We have maybe a little too much fun playing that game. :D We also watched the New Moon trailer - we went to see Twilight together, and had a great time mocking it - and I introduced them all to the word "fursplosion". I also told them about the Buffy meets Edward vid I found through the Sparklefield the other day.
Monday was pretty uninteresting - a few more encounters with wildlife, including a chipmunk and a baby bird in Mary's garden. There's a groundhog (at least one) living at the base of my road; I saw it again, too.
Yesterday, man - speaking of Hellboy, I had the Samael of flies on my back all day. Usually, an insect has to have a certain spindliness to it for me to be comfortable killing it; mosquitoes, for example. Flies, I can't usually bear to smash - but I made an exception yesterday. And I swear, for every fly I killed, I ended up with two more buzzing around. Ugh.
I'm taking today "off" - which is to say, off from weeding for Mary; I still have to vacuum the house for my mother, and go to the post office, and do some fun coordinatey-type things for my thesis. Which, I should probably get started. :D
