nor so wide as a church door

Christmas was lovely, and I hope everybody had a lovely Friday, no matter what they were celebrating or not celebrating. I got books! And movies! And more books! :D I haven't actually read any of the books I was given yet; I've been too busy reading the ones I gave to other people.

The one I feel like blabbing about specifically is ( Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Technically, spoilers within. ) It was reasonably fun to read, and there were portions that I genuinely loved, but the changes to the book's universe could have been handled much better than they were, IMO. As I was reading, I kept catching myself thinking that any one of a handful of fandom people could have done a much more awesome job with it.

As for movies, well. My family and I went to go see Avatar. I had queasy and hesitant feelings about this movie the first time I heard what it was about, and actually seeing the movie ... ( did not really alleviate those feelings. Definite spoilers, in here. ) The bottom line is that it was a very pretty movie, and that's just about the only positive thing I can say. Neytiri, Grace, and Trudy were all wonderful characters who did not get to do nearly as much as I wanted them to; and the whole thing was filled with undercurrents of racism, sexism, and ableism that really drove me crazy. Thinking about it now, it reminds me a little of 300 - if I could turn off the analytic part of my brain that is concerned with unfunny business, the part that fandom turned on and that I am extremely grateful for, it was decent enough, if still painfully unoriginal. But I can't turn that part off, and I don't really want to.

Sherlock Holmes, I liked infinitely better. My family was planning to see it Christmas Day, but those plans fell through because my sister got sick and didn't feel much like going out. So I saw it with my friends a few days later, and hopefully will be seeing it again with my family. And, my god, ( the slash. Spoilers here, too, natch. ) I reeeeeeeally hope at least a few people do some fic in this 'verse; it may not have been the best movie in the entire world, but it was reasonably solid and fun and struck me as a welcoming sort of source when it comes to fic. (Not that book canon or other adaptations haven't been - although I am pleased by a young and clever and competent Watson, some Holmes sources kind of shortchange him. Didn't hurt that he was Jude Law, either. :D)

The most significant event aside from that stuff would be that I somehow managed to blow through the rest of the terrifying HP AU, and now it's ... done. Book 1 of it, at least. Of course, I need to edit it before I can even consider putting it up anywhere; but being finished with the first draft is still a pretty awesome milestone. I'm not sure it's even really sunk in yet. Thank goodness there's a Burn Notice marathon right now, or I don't know what I would do with myself. ^^

I have a super thrilling pair of accounts to add to my collection of wildlife stories, both of them to do with what I'm fairly sure were great blue herons. \o/

Account #1: ( My mother bought some kayaks this summer. )

And then there comes Account #2, where ( not a day, later, my sister and I are driving home from the grocery store, and what do we get stuck behind? )

I'm pretty sure I've seen herons around before, but at a much greater distance - sometimes we'd catch sight of one in the lagoon by the Montshire, and that kind of thing, but nothing like this. It was wonderful.

Anyway, on to slightly less interesting things - my birthday. Again. My sister's TTLY UNKNOWN present for me ended up getting sent to her old address at Clark University, which is where she graduated a little over a year ago; no word yet on whether they'll be sending it on. (I just hope they caught it in the office before it got to anybody's box; I can't imagine anybody passing on a free copy of ... uh, whatever it is.) However, this tragic news was made up for by the party my friends threw for me yesterday, which was lovely: we made cake and cupcakes and icing ourselves, before going to see Julie & Julia, and then coming back, making dinner, and nomming away. We also played games - Set, and Sequence, and way too many rounds of Spoons. (Sometimes we play things that don't start with S, I promise.)

K, who is very artistically inclined and does beautiful, rather impressionistic paintings of scenery, gave me one such painting; M gave me a lovely, barely-used copy of the fourth Harry Dresden book in French. ("Les Dossiers Dresden - Le Chevalier D'Été"! It's too bad the title puns don't work in French.) Which has had the bonus effect of broadening my library of French books to something other than the second and third Harry Potter books and Le Petit Prince. Not that I don't love reading Harry Potter in French, but it's usually less an exercise for the atrophying French parts of my brain, and more "... Oh, hey, so that's how you say that sentence - which I remember verbatim because I've read HP waaaaaaaaaaay too many times - in French!".

Because I have nothing better to do right now: ( Julie & Julia. ) It was good; it's not the love of my life, it doesn't reduce me to exclamation points and keyboard smashing, but it was sweet and fun to watch and it made me smile, and sometimes that's all I really want from a movie.

I had a brief argument with J while we were waiting for the movie over two things: first, RDJ as Sherlock Holmes, and second, the concept of slash. ( Explanation and further thoughts on the first. ) If somebody's going to remix me a funny, gritty, possibly wacky new take on Sherlock Holmes with RDJ and Jude Law in, I am totally okay with that, even if it does deviate from canon. I mean, obviously, I don't know; maybe it's going to be terrible and stupid and I'm going to hate it and wish I had never bothered arguing with J about it based on nothing more than a preview. But I have to say, at this point it looks exactly like my kind of movie.

The second was actually less an argument, and more a brief discussion where J said something I disagreed strongly with, I gave an audible rebuttal that was kind of half-hearted because I didn't want to blow things out of proportion, and then I spent a while poking at it in my head afterward. ( The basic context is that M said that she didn't really understand what slash was; J's response was that it was crack. ) I think J has adjusted her position somewhat since that point - going to Mount Holyoke has loosened her up a fair bit as far as issues of sexuality go - but I think I had been hoping it had been adjusted further than the baby step between "people only write slash because there's not girls enough for pairing fic" and "people only write slash because they like how crazy the whole idea is". Here's hoping that sooner or later I can maybe get her all the way to "people write slash for all kinds of different reasons, including 'because they ship it, and not as a crackship'", I guess.

And, wow, this got long. Clearly today is a wordy day for me - I should go rack up some wordcount on something, before the spirit of verbosity abandons me.