lettered | Reading

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”

Robert Frost

hannah

Current Mood: sore
Current Music: The Horizon is a Beltway - The Low Anthem

In preparation for Disclosure Day next month, I'm going through all of Steven Spielberg's movies I haven't yet seen. I know there's some good ones in there, so I started on the ones I've largely been avoiding because I know they're not his better outings. Let me say I don't think it's at all possible he's got something worse than Ready Player One. It might be better than the book, and there's only so far you can polish a turd. Though I'll give it credit for highlighting the difference mindsets of curatorial and transformative fandom in a way that's impossible to argue with.

Adjusting to the new schedule's going well enough. As with many jobs, getting a good night's sleep beforehand is key to a good day. I'm hoping to be done by July, which is why I told my client it might take me until August.

flamingsword

• I started a new migraine preventative midafternoon today, and about 5 minutes later got a headache, 🤕. Hopefully it’ll sort itself out by morning.

• I finally remembered to book the moving van today, yay for brain dumps! They seem to be the pen and paper equivalent of taking everything out of your purse and shaking it to find the keys you know are in there but can’t find. Sometimes you really do have to turn things off and back on again.

• I have started packing up the bathroom and the closet, and I feel less ready for the move than I did a few days ago? Dunno what that’s about.

• I feel better enough to work tomorrow, and am encouraging everyone to mask up bc even the illnesses out there that aren’t the flu and Covid are apparently still fucking miserable to have. Seriously, do not get this thing. I don’t even remember Tuesday, and Monday is real sketchy in some places but what I know of from my texts sent at the time is that I was “sleepy, groggy, dizzy, achey, cough-y, headaching, and cold. It’s like the seven dwarves of sick in here.”

lotesse

Not time’s fool (14650 words) by lotesse
Chapters: 9/?
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Caspian/Lucy Pevensie
Characters: Lucy Pevensie, Caspian (Narnia), Ramandu's Daughter | Liliandil, Edmund Pevensie, Peter Pevensie, Polly Plummer, Digory Kirke, Eustace Scrubb, Lord Rhoop (Narnia)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Romance, Sailing, Prophecy
Series: Part 3 of An ever-fixèd mark
Summary:

By remaining in Narnia, and not going home again, Lucy had purposefully thrown herself in the path of fate, making herself the obstacle to derail the terrible train of events from its determined track, which had the prophesied end of all Narnia at its end, and her own premature death in a ruined railway carriage. She wasn’t going to let that happen. She had made of herself a lodestone, pulling fate out of its accustomed course. Inevitably, she would leave change in her wake. She meant it to be so, for the preservation of all.

anghraine

Current Location: Washington, USA
Current Music: Stand By Me (Ben E. King)

Apropos of my other brotp post, a couple of additional details I love about the Kirk-Uhura friendship that I forgot before!

1— There are two different occasions in TOS where Kirk not only accepts the strong possibility of death, loss, and failure with grace, and not only takes personal responsibility ("I don't believe in no-win scenarios" whomst), but sets aside a moment to record posthumous commendations for particularly exemplary crew members during the crisis, in hopes that even in death those people will be honored. In both cases, he especially singles out Spock as extra special (news at eleven). But in fact, there are only two people, including Spock, whom Kirk mentions in both sets of commendations. You'd think from the fandom's obsession with "the triumvirate" that McCoy would be the other person on both lists, but he's actually only on one of them. The second person Kirk singles out for praise both times is Uhura.

2— So, when J and I were first marathoning TOS, I didn't know much about Nichelle Nichols outside of ST, but I became increasingly convinced that, like William Shatner, she must have been forged by the stage in some meaningful way. (Spoiler: she was.)

Although their performances are very different in many ways, of course, there seemed some marked similarities in how both inhabit their characters. They both have a kind of "always on" intense stage presence, where even if they're on the sidelines or background without really speaking or having much to do, they are still fully present in their roles; both perform like they're always potentially being seen whether or not they're 100% sure the camera is on them. Both of them do particularly heavy lifting in defining their characters through this kind of intensity of presence (sometimes rather against the grain of the writing or of other agendas at work) but also via very precisely calibrated performances when the writing isn't absolutely godawful/vacuous. TOS is so vibrant and expressionist that I think the precision in the okay-to-great episodes (most of them!) is often overlooked or even denied, but it's all over much of the show IMO; you can especially see it in Nichols' and Shatner's nearly surgical comic timing, but hardly only there.

So both Nichols and Shatner are actors who can be just standing or sitting in a chair, barely speaking or not speaking at all, barely moving and fairly understated, and yet their command of the stage is so effective that it's hard to tear your eyes from them. It's like the visual acting version of the voice that's so good you'd listen to them read the phonebook. I ended up being like, "wow, I'm pretty sure I could just watch Nichelle Nichols or William Shatner sit in a chair for ten minutes straight, those are some hella stage chops."

( Read more... )

sixbeforelunch

One of the great things about Murder She Wrote is all of the actors doing terrible Maine accents. It never fails to amuse.

princessofgeeks

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

lemonlips43 posting in

fictional_fans

Current Mood: contemplative

Title: La seduction
Author: Lemonlips43
Fandom: Pokemon-The original series
Rating: Teen
Characters/Pairings: Gary/Ash
Genres: Romance,Humor and angst
Word count: 745 (the first chapter)
Summary:Ash finds himself in love with Misty and decides to ask Gary for lessons on how to win over girls. Gary surprisingly accepts, but are Gary's intentions truly pure? And does Ash really love misty as much as he says?
Aditional tags-Jealousy,Compulsory Heterosexuality,Kantou-chihou | Kanto Region (Pokemon)

I wrote this fanfic i was thinking about writing it a long time now i finally got courage and will to write it!

READ ON AO3
READ ON MY JOURNAL

settiai

Current Mood: accomplished

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

settiai

Current Mood: accomplished

I made chicken and dumplings in the slow cooker today, because it was a bleak rainy day so it seemed appropriate. The recipe itself is very basic (chicken, cream of chicken soup, an onion, butter, chicken broth, and some spices), and I cheat and use canned biscuits for the dumplings because I'm lazy.

The issue was that I had a few biscuits left over, because I needed about 10oz but Aldi only has them in 16oz packages. So I decided to experiment and attempt to make something sweet for dessert with the leftover biscuit dough, and I think it turned out pretty well.

I cut the biscuits into quarters, brushed them with some oil, popped them in the air fryer for eight minutes, dipped them in melted butter, dropped them in a bag with some cinnamon sugar, and shook it up. Then for the dip I just mixed together some powdered sugar, heavy cream, and vanilla.

They turned out surprisingly tasty for something that I threw together in a few minutes.

buttonsbeadslace

- Caught a cold and was feeling pretty terrible over the weekend, but I'm recovered now with only a little lingering cough.
- Water heater failed -> 2 weeks without hot water -> new water heater installed -> circuit does not have enough power to turn it on at full power -> unknown period of time from today onward with mildly warmish water.
- Had a hilarious conversation about International Workers' Day and why the US doesn't celebrate it. Spanish teacher was surprised to hear that the US does have its own separate workers' holiday, then surprised that it is a federal holiday, then perplexed that I said the US has plenty of federal holidays because he thought there were only a few, then jokingly horrified that I said that most businesses just don't observe the "less important" ones. "It's a holiday, but they don't give you the day off? Do they get to hit you with a whip, also?"
- Today in class we read about the phenomenon in Spain of older people who need a source of income in retirement selling the future ownership of their homes - so the buyer pays right away, but doesn't actually take possession of the home until after the seller passes away. The teacher and I had a nice little conversation about the 2008 financial crisis and the slightly different paths it took in Spain vs the US, while the rest of the class, all under-30-year-olds, stared into space and waited for the boring part to be over. Although I don't know if the difference in reaction is really down to age - I was (only just) old enough to be paying attention in 2008 but I certainly didn't have a mortgage - or if it's just that I think social issues and government policy are interesting and most people don't.

firethesound

New words this week : 8,912 words which is back up, woo!

WIPs worked on this week : 2, with no new WIPs (yay!)

Still very tired and this is kind of a rough week, but it's halfway over and at least words are coming along!

The Old Guard

☆ food truck au : 8,912 words which brings the total to 147,812 words and I am fully in denial about what the finished wordcount on this thing will be because, seriously, how am I almost at 150k?? With five chapters still left to finish??? This is undoubtedly going to be the longest thing I've ever written and I'm not sure how to feel about that. Last chapter gave me a lot of trouble, and there's one particular conversation I wrote and rewrote and rewrote over and over before I think I've got it working, and hoping that my beta will confirm that it does (or will have some insight into why it's not!) and now after multiple chapters of smut, Chapter 14 is a bit of a quieter thing, jumping forward in time a little, and reeling back in some of the subplots I've left dangling for the past while.

lemonlips43 posting in

fictional_fans

Current Mood: dorky

Hi,i am new on this community and on dreamwidth in general and some days ago i drew this fanart of Gary x misty,I LUV GARY X MISTY they are two Idiots and one of my favorite pokemon ships,they almost never interact but ok i have fanon.

snickfic

Trad Wife (2026) by Saratoga Schaefer. A would-be tradwife influencer wants a baby for both personal and professional reasons, but her husband won't have sex with her (because he's clearly cheating on her), so instead she has sex with the shadow creature in the well on edge of the property. This plan obviously has no flaws whatsoever. AKA: the trad wife novel that ISN'T about time travel.

This was fun and a quick read. It leaned harder on the monsterfucker element than I expected, and where I was expecting mostly psychological horror with elements of the supernatural, no, the supernatural stuff was front and center. I appreciated how our tradwife has depths that she is progessively less able to keep hidden, and I was just as mad at the past and present men in her life as the book wanted me to be. Her husband is just the woooooorst.

That said, ( spoilers )

I also felt that the degree to which she's consciously, actively deceiving herself about what's happening with her pregnancy was just kind of silly. I would have liked subtler writing there.

--

Roadside Picnic (1972) by the Strugatsky Brothers. A man makes a living sneaking into the "Zone," a restricted area full of dangers and treasure left by a one-time visit by aliens.

I completely coincidentally got interested in this and the adaptation Stalker almost simultaneously, without realizing they were related. In both cases I went in with, it turned out, unfounded (but different!) expectations of what I was going to get. Stalker isn't really a cosmic horror movie, alas, although the bones of one are there, and meanwhile this isn't very interested in the Zone at all, at least not as a setting, which if nothing else is a big contrast from the movie! I can see why people say it's a very loose adaptation.

This novel is actually about the daily life of a guy trying to steal forbidden alien artifacts and sell them to the black market, his dealings with various shady characters, and how hard this all is on his family. There are a lot of themes of hopelessness and corruption. It feels very 70s in its mundane focus with Big SF Ideas relegated to the background.

Unfortunately I was super uninterested in most of this. The grimy details of social corruption as seen through our lead's gross sexist lens: not what I came for! I came here for the weird horror shit, the "hell slime" that disintegrates your bones and turns your limbs into rubber, the gravity traps that crush you flat, and the various other hazards of the Zone, which we get only at the very beginning and very end.

I can definitely see why it's a classic: it generally accomplishes what it's trying to do, and it treats its characters and their reality with total unironic seriousness. But it was not what I wanted, alas.

selenak

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: Berlin

In which Boyd and Miles share Benjamin Sisko duties - or is one of them Dax?

( Past Tense: The For All Mankind Edition )

hannah

Current Mood: relaxed
Current Music: Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) - Arcade Fire

Sometimes I think of myself as largely ignorant of computers, unable to identify a problem I've been having lately with enough precision to fully troubleshoot it or even find out what's going wrong sometimes. And then there's days like today where I meet someone who doesn't know what an operating system is. Key to this: she's at least a decade older than I am and does a lot of work on her own computer. I had to explain what an operating system is so I could explain a joke I made about Linux, and then I had to explain Linux.

It's for the best that I didn't go for the obvious Kinsey scale joke when she told her trainer she was straight. "At least a Kinsey two," is what I'd have said if I'd thought she'd have gotten it.

In other news, I only used a little of the bottle of prosecco I bought for the springtime asparagus-ramp risotto, and the pressure of the remaining bubbles had the stopper knock off in the fridge. I suppose the best solution is simply to drink it.