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This is probably going to end up a huge, unwieldy monster of a post, but, again, I have accumulated absolute oodles of things to say.
So.
I went home this past weekend. It was Old Home Day, or possibly Olde Home Day, I can't really remember which; there is a parade, and also food and tents and sometimes animals on the town green. The quality of all of these things has a way of varying wildly from year to year, and this was not one of the more impressive years; me and my stilts were actually one of the more interesting things in the parade, which was a little sad. I felt awful for all the kids - usually there's a lot more (very homemade) floats and things, and most of them have candy to throw, so the kids in town bring bags to collect candy with. I wish we'd thought to maybe stop at Dan & Whit's beforehand, and bought a bag, so that I'd have had something to toss them.
Although my aim when I'm walking on stilts is probably life-threateningly bad.
It was still quite a bit of fun, though; I've gotten so good at answering the same five questions ("My sister made the stilt pants; I learned at circus camp; I have to sit on the car to put them on; I'm about nine feet tall with them; the weather up here is just fine, ha ha") that it doesn't even make me all that nervous to talk to people anymore. And there's something about stiltwalking that makes it fun despite all expectations to the contrary - yes, technically, it's nothing more than strapping a couple pieces of wood to your legs and walking around, but it's weirdly enjoyable nonetheless.
The guineas are enormous - they've got to be at least five or six times as big as they were when they were newly-hatched and fluffed out, and their feathers have come out very fast. Fortunately, their heads haven't changed much, so you can still tell Clary, DG, and Evey apart by looking at the sides of their faces; but I expect that won't last too much longer. Maybe we should write the first letters of their names on their legs with a Sharpie, or something.
While I was at home, I resumed my usual pose of sloth on the couch, which was how I came to end up watching Blade: Trinity. I have only seen tiny bits of other Blade movies; most of what I know about the franchise, I have learned from the previews, which amounted to just enough to impress somebody with a nerdy reference to the term "daywalker", and not much else.
Obviously, it wasn't exactly genius, but I wasn't expecting genius out of it. What it did have was quite a bit of the kind of stylized violence that I am sometimes in the mood for - watching violently beautiful people do beautifully violent things while occasionally tossing off wisecracks. There were several instances when Abigail was shooting her insanely pretty vampire-death-bow where I wished I could pause it, and I bet it's a pretty sweet movie to cap. Wesley Snipes, Jessica Biel, and Ryan Reynolds were all smoking hot, and I was pleased by the inclusion of the blind woman (I came into the movie too late to learn her name; judging by IMDb, I perhaps mean Sommerfield) and her daughter. Her death, I was less happy about, although Abigail screaming and sobbing over her body before going off to fight struck a chord - I've sometimes found myself wanting more stories about women righteously obtaining revenge for the deaths of other women, and that seemed to me like a very plausible reading, even though the movie didn't push it super hard that way.
The end was a little ham-handed about setting up for a possible sequel, but that's not much of a quibble. I think if I get the chance to watch it again - and all the way through, this time - I'll probably take it. And it was very weird to seeRay Kowalski CKR as a bad guy yet again - I don't even know why that weirds me out so much, it's not like I've actually watched due South, and yet a combination of people's icons and Googling have imprinted him on me as RayK. Oh, and John Doe as Dracula was just ... wow. That was very strange. (Not that he didn't do a good job, or anything, but John Doe was so ... well, okay, mild-mannered is the wrong word, considering some of the stuff he did on the show, but.)
When I came back to UVM on Sunday night, B wasn't in the room, so I went upstairs, to visit my suitemates from last year - let's say Br and AT, if I haven't already called them something else. Anyway, they were watching Penelope, which I have already seen once before. ... I think that time was with Br, too, come to think of it. I cannot ever be wholly objective about Penelope, because I am totally mad about James MacAvoy (♥♥♥♥♥); however, there are still always a few things I feel like discussing after I watch it.
For one, I did not find myself wholly satisfied by the workings of the curse. I loved the reasoning behind Johnny's angst (he wants to marry her, except he's not a blue-blood, so he doesn't even have a chance of breaking the curse, and she just promised that she'd kill herself if marrying him didn't break it! Come on, that is delicious!), I'm totally on board with that. But the breakage struck me as weird. It seemed almost cruel that the moment Penelope managed to stand up to her mother, the moment that she said she liked herself that way she was and had it be true, was the moment that the way she was suddenly got changed forever. I think the Aesop (a paraphrase of the explanation given by Conveniently Insightful Small Child: "the power of the curse depends on the power you give the curse") would have made a lot more sense if she had kept the pig nose, and simply stopped treating it as though it were a curse - stop treating your curse like it's a curse, and ... it'll be like you aren't cursed. Ta-da!
Also, the plot felt a little zig-zaggy, at times; it was like nobody could actually decide whether the story was supposed to be a quirky modern fairytale, or a story that was a quirky modern play on fairytales that was trying to avoid, rather than subvert or invert, the genre tropes. And, lastly, thank you so very much, every bandom fic that has ever made any mention of the potential resemblance between Gerard Way in drag and Christina Ricci; it was like an optical illusion, my brain kept flipping back and forth between what was actually happening in the movie and "omg if I squint like this I can pretend Gerard Way and James MacAvoy are gazing soulfully at each other!!!1!"
I'd natter some more about my classes, but there's not a lot to say. I am still mildly underwhelmed by Audiology; as always, I love the professor, but she spent at least half an hour explaining something that seemed ... only the slightest bit tricky, if even tricky at all, to me. :P I did finally get my books for World Lit; the Egyptian poetry is just as awesome as I remember, and I want to dust off that one conlang and try translating a few; hopefully, I'll get around to that during all my free time tomorrow. And Cog-Neuro is still simultaneously dizzying and boring, a combination which is not exactly improved by the stultifying heat in that classroom. Blegh.
I did finally manage to force out the seventeenth chapter of the HP AU, which is good, because that was really tripping me up; the beginning of the eighteenth has come much more easily, which hopefully means I won't get quite as stuck on it. And all my free time so far has been incredibly good for my cliché-fic - I now have a bewildering one hundred and eighty-one (181!) snippets, of varying length and equally varying odds of ever being finished, over ... four fandoms (well, four fandoms if you don't count the ones the crossovers cross over with, at least). I am simultaneously impressed and unimpressed with myself.
So.
I went home this past weekend. It was Old Home Day, or possibly Olde Home Day, I can't really remember which; there is a parade, and also food and tents and sometimes animals on the town green. The quality of all of these things has a way of varying wildly from year to year, and this was not one of the more impressive years; me and my stilts were actually one of the more interesting things in the parade, which was a little sad. I felt awful for all the kids - usually there's a lot more (very homemade) floats and things, and most of them have candy to throw, so the kids in town bring bags to collect candy with. I wish we'd thought to maybe stop at Dan & Whit's beforehand, and bought a bag, so that I'd have had something to toss them.
Although my aim when I'm walking on stilts is probably life-threateningly bad.
It was still quite a bit of fun, though; I've gotten so good at answering the same five questions ("My sister made the stilt pants; I learned at circus camp; I have to sit on the car to put them on; I'm about nine feet tall with them; the weather up here is just fine, ha ha") that it doesn't even make me all that nervous to talk to people anymore. And there's something about stiltwalking that makes it fun despite all expectations to the contrary - yes, technically, it's nothing more than strapping a couple pieces of wood to your legs and walking around, but it's weirdly enjoyable nonetheless.
The guineas are enormous - they've got to be at least five or six times as big as they were when they were newly-hatched and fluffed out, and their feathers have come out very fast. Fortunately, their heads haven't changed much, so you can still tell Clary, DG, and Evey apart by looking at the sides of their faces; but I expect that won't last too much longer. Maybe we should write the first letters of their names on their legs with a Sharpie, or something.
While I was at home, I resumed my usual pose of sloth on the couch, which was how I came to end up watching Blade: Trinity. I have only seen tiny bits of other Blade movies; most of what I know about the franchise, I have learned from the previews, which amounted to just enough to impress somebody with a nerdy reference to the term "daywalker", and not much else.
Obviously, it wasn't exactly genius, but I wasn't expecting genius out of it. What it did have was quite a bit of the kind of stylized violence that I am sometimes in the mood for - watching violently beautiful people do beautifully violent things while occasionally tossing off wisecracks. There were several instances when Abigail was shooting her insanely pretty vampire-death-bow where I wished I could pause it, and I bet it's a pretty sweet movie to cap. Wesley Snipes, Jessica Biel, and Ryan Reynolds were all smoking hot, and I was pleased by the inclusion of the blind woman (I came into the movie too late to learn her name; judging by IMDb, I perhaps mean Sommerfield) and her daughter. Her death, I was less happy about, although Abigail screaming and sobbing over her body before going off to fight struck a chord - I've sometimes found myself wanting more stories about women righteously obtaining revenge for the deaths of other women, and that seemed to me like a very plausible reading, even though the movie didn't push it super hard that way.
The end was a little ham-handed about setting up for a possible sequel, but that's not much of a quibble. I think if I get the chance to watch it again - and all the way through, this time - I'll probably take it. And it was very weird to see
When I came back to UVM on Sunday night, B wasn't in the room, so I went upstairs, to visit my suitemates from last year - let's say Br and AT, if I haven't already called them something else. Anyway, they were watching Penelope, which I have already seen once before. ... I think that time was with Br, too, come to think of it. I cannot ever be wholly objective about Penelope, because I am totally mad about James MacAvoy (♥♥♥♥♥); however, there are still always a few things I feel like discussing after I watch it.
For one, I did not find myself wholly satisfied by the workings of the curse. I loved the reasoning behind Johnny's angst (he wants to marry her, except he's not a blue-blood, so he doesn't even have a chance of breaking the curse, and she just promised that she'd kill herself if marrying him didn't break it! Come on, that is delicious!), I'm totally on board with that. But the breakage struck me as weird. It seemed almost cruel that the moment Penelope managed to stand up to her mother, the moment that she said she liked herself that way she was and had it be true, was the moment that the way she was suddenly got changed forever. I think the Aesop (a paraphrase of the explanation given by Conveniently Insightful Small Child: "the power of the curse depends on the power you give the curse") would have made a lot more sense if she had kept the pig nose, and simply stopped treating it as though it were a curse - stop treating your curse like it's a curse, and ... it'll be like you aren't cursed. Ta-da!
Also, the plot felt a little zig-zaggy, at times; it was like nobody could actually decide whether the story was supposed to be a quirky modern fairytale, or a story that was a quirky modern play on fairytales that was trying to avoid, rather than subvert or invert, the genre tropes. And, lastly, thank you so very much, every bandom fic that has ever made any mention of the potential resemblance between Gerard Way in drag and Christina Ricci; it was like an optical illusion, my brain kept flipping back and forth between what was actually happening in the movie and "omg if I squint like this I can pretend Gerard Way and James MacAvoy are gazing soulfully at each other!!!1!"
I'd natter some more about my classes, but there's not a lot to say. I am still mildly underwhelmed by Audiology; as always, I love the professor, but she spent at least half an hour explaining something that seemed ... only the slightest bit tricky, if even tricky at all, to me. :P I did finally get my books for World Lit; the Egyptian poetry is just as awesome as I remember, and I want to dust off that one conlang and try translating a few; hopefully, I'll get around to that during all my free time tomorrow. And Cog-Neuro is still simultaneously dizzying and boring, a combination which is not exactly improved by the stultifying heat in that classroom. Blegh.
I did finally manage to force out the seventeenth chapter of the HP AU, which is good, because that was really tripping me up; the beginning of the eighteenth has come much more easily, which hopefully means I won't get quite as stuck on it. And all my free time so far has been incredibly good for my cliché-fic - I now have a bewildering one hundred and eighty-one (181!) snippets, of varying length and equally varying odds of ever being finished, over ... four fandoms (well, four fandoms if you don't count the ones the crossovers cross over with, at least). I am simultaneously impressed and unimpressed with myself.