silverflight8

The King's Man (2021)

2022-03-01T05:49:44Z

This movie was bonkers. I was expecting something like MCU levels of explosions, fantasy/sc-fi explanations and gadgets, etc. I was not prepared.

*Not a single idea who the lead actor was when I walked in; after walking out, was very impressed by whoever it was, and it turns out, it is Ralph Fiennes. He's the main reason that the movie works at all. Amazing screen presence, made me believe he truly wanted the best for his son, even if the way he was going about it was definitely destined for tragic failure. Throughout the utter WTF of the movie, he still made you believe and want him to succeed, and I think that's a huge testament to Fiennes. This is my strongest impression of the movie.

*At first I was annoyed that they used Wilfred Owen's poem to add extra pathos to the scene, but then they actually went and killed Conrad, so, well, okay, at least they went all the way there. Overall I was prettty impressed by how they handled the whole WWI backdrop. Trench warfare was awful and muddy and very, very bloody, and I was expecting Conrad to survive miraculously, and he nearly does. Really, he does. To be shot when he had made it back...oof. That hurts. We got to find out as Oxford did, too, which made it more effective. At first, you think that it's mostly just Conrad managing to get onto the front lines, by swapping with Archie, and it's just the swap that he's confessing to; it's only as the action keeps playing and you realize what actually happened.

*Depiction of Rasputin ?????

*TBH the whole section that takes place in Russia. It's like all the wildest hearsay being repeated and depicted as though real.

*Everything about the Flock was just...wow, okay. But you know what, I respect the aesthetics of the virtually inaccessible sheep farm atop a mountain. I'm fundamentally quite a pragmatic and lazy person and so living up there would be way, way more logistical complications than I could ever deal with, but it is undoubtedly cool and very remote. And it was probably made before aerial troops could be deployed effectively, so it was pretty good before then.

*They gave Djimon Hounsou and Gemma Arterton supporting parts to play, but none of them got to really...do anything. Gemma got to play the arch female servant who knows everything, but the protagonist is still Oxford, who gets to play all kinds of things - to be noble, heroic, kind, but also sometimes foolish, grieving, angry, overprotective...Djimon mostly got to play "super loyal servant". It was just disappointing. This is partly just how the story is told. In a two hour movie, the protagonist is always going to get most development, they will be the most centered and the action, feelings, and story revolve around him. But they never really gave either of them anything interesting or novel to play to round them out a bit.

*I unfortunately never got immersed in the movie except maybe the part during the trenches. It was just so hilariously OTT but also generally expected in terms of character moments - the part where Oxford and his family go to visit the aid camps in the Boer War made me cringe. After you realized that Oxford had brought his family to a war zone, the fallout is pretty much by the book. Of course his wife gets killed in front of him and his son, of course she tells him with her dying breath to make sure her son doesn't see war...argh, so predictable.

*The Great War was created via the machinations of an evil Scottish man who wishes for independence? I do realize that superhero movies, which let me be clear I absolutely enjoy, have this foundational fantasy that one person's action can solve or ameliorate crippling problems humanity has faced since the beginning of humanity, like meting out appropriate justice, etc, but come on. I mean it's not very fun to have superheroes battle stuff like "the rising nationalism in many different parts of Europe" and "complicated alliances"; they gotta fist-fight or sword-fight a person, preferably the person controlling all these bad things, but the specific spectre of Scottish independence is weirdly unpalatable.

Overall though...hey, I enjoyed it. Even if I walked out thinking what just happened?!" (The last stinger contributed.)

(Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/202656.html)

Cinderella Is Dead - Kaylnn Bayron

2022-02-22T04:52:36Z

An awful book I read for book club. I say this upfront because I am pretty sure I would never have picked up this book in the first place - I hate fairytale retellings, I last enjoyed a YA book in 2011, it was not fated to be - but also if I had, I'd have dropped it immediately, within the first two pages. Not angrily, like throwing it against the wall. Just the first few pages would have hit me, and then I'd have thought "well I think that's enough for now" and never picked it back up again.

However.

I had to read it, I hated it, I dissected it for book club, I still hate it.

I think the main problem with this book is it that it is just not very well done. Just mechanically, the author can't pull it off. She doesn't seem to know how to construct the story in a way that makes you feel for the protagonist, she doesn't know how to make setting that's interesting or well thought out, her writing on the prose level is tedious to read because she won't stop demonstrating and then re-telling what she wrote. The book has a high concept premise and then utterly fails to execute because the author doesn't have the chops. All my problems with it came down to this.

The plot basically boils down to a kingdom where girls, once they turn sixteen, are mandated to go to a ball where the men choose them as brides. This ball is in celebration of the first Cinderella, who existed, and who met Prince Charming at the ball. Sophia doesn't want to do any of this, she's in love with her friend Erin. But none of them have a choice. She goes to the ball but flees in the middle of it, meets an outlaw girl who is descended from the stepsisters, and they flee into the woods and meet a witch. They come up with a plan to kill Prince Charming.

The book is incredibly heavy-handed. It's honestly just short of closing every chapter with "Moral Lesson: a government that kills anyone who is arrested is Bad". Everything is ludicrously overdone. No one speaks - everyone opens their mouths and monologues fall out. I had to start skimming the dialogue because it bothered me so much. Furthermore it's clear that people also say things because the plot requires it. There's no sense that the dialogue is something that the character would say because that's the sort of person they are. Things happen because the plot would require it; startling things help the plot along because, well, they just do, all right? The stepsisters in the Disney version of Cinderella are portrayed as horrible and scheming; they are here, too, in the Palace Approved Version of the Text, but it is revealed later that actually, they were freedom fighters and extremely Good. Cinderella's mother was killed defying Prince Charming! I like that the stepsisters aren't evil - the latent undercurrent of misogyny is not subtle in their depiction - but it's not possible that they were ordinary people who were good and bad, or mostly good and a little impatient, or something. No, they have to be extra special perfect good people - quite literally martyrs, except no one knows them, but dying for their cause nonetheless to inspire Sophia later.

I also struggled to find something to enjoy about the book. Sometimes you read books for the plot, or you fall in love with the characters, or the romance is super fun to read. There are a variety of things one can enjoy about a book. I just couldn't find any. It also made me mad from a romance viewpoint. Sophia starts out the book in love with Erin, we are told this many times. But Erin is afraid and does not want to live with the consequences of defying the laws of the culture she's grown up with - the punishment for defiance is death, and their friend gets killed the night of the ball just like that. Sophia runs off without her, and promptly - like within a few days - falls in love with the outlaw girl. This is not a very satisfying book from a romance standpoint. Within a few days, Sophia goes from being in love with Erin for years, to being totally heads over heels for Constance.

There is much reference to the original tale of Cinderella. In this kingdom, it's practically a holy text. Every household has one, it's regularly read from and quoted, Sophia has much of it memorized. Part of the plot involves Sophia and Constance reading a non-"Palace approved" version of the book, which Constance is carrying around. The illustrations are different...for just this one story. This is part of the catalyst for them to realize that the story isn't right. I have so many objections this that I'm actually struggling to put them down. This whole book is just this multifaceted mess of incompetent, it's hard to convey. My biggest objection boils down to why is this necessary? This book was obviously written with an eye to the social justice aspect, to the high concept idea of Cinderella except what if she did not get married and had her own agency and was gay and black, and overthrew an oppressive regime? In that light, ow is it satisfying to have your protagonist realize the truth and be motivated to overthrow the evil king by realizing the palace's copy of the book is a distortion? Does it really matter so much that the palace is lying to you, so much as all the many (MANY) ways that Sophia's life is curtailed and . Why isn't the desire to overthrow him coming from somewhere internal? It just feels like such a weak way to do this.

Also, I know this is because this book does not operate on worldbuilding logic, but that's not how book illustrations work! Unless you think that all the books that everyone owns in this vaguely-medieval society are all hand-illustrated, and Constance just has an extra special copy. But everyone has a copy even though it's an illustration-heavy book and even today, would be expensive. There are so many weirdnesses like this, because Bayron either wants to draw clearer inferences to modern society, or didn't bother thinking about worldbuilding details, or just plain sloppiness. If you think about what's going on for more than a second, it doesn't make sense logistically or emotionally.

On the ideological note, I keep harping on this because that's clearly what Bayron built the book around. But some of the plot undercuts the message. They go for help to a witch in the woods, so in the end it's Constance, Sophia and Amina against Prince Charming. But then, shockingly! Amina is also evil! In fact, Prince Charming is evil because Amina was evil, and Amina is his mother. So the root of the evil is still....women. He's literally her son. I think you could certainly spin this in a way that would be a nuanced take - it's hard to exist in a patriarchal society and no one escapes it - but this is never really addressed, and it's galling that a book so devoted to and exclusively about The Moral Message is failing to deliver that, because Bayron didn't think through any of the implications. What also disappoints me is that Amina was initially depicted as someone who admitted that she made a huge mistake, and was angry and afraid and hiding (two hundred years later). But instead it just turns out she was evil and in league with Prince Charming all along.

The book ends with the monarchy being overthrown and a People's Approved Text of the Cinderella story published. I'm sure Bayron doesn't realize how much this screams Communist wording, and I feel quite confident about saying she did not intend this reading in the least - it's just sloppy. Also, the monarchy is overthrown, and now the kingdom Lille is overseen by another monarchy, with Constance at the head with "a council [of] six individuals, handpicked by [Constance]". Why Constance? Because she's the nearest kin. So yes, a government that passes power down to people via blood descent. Also Constance has been vocal about treating men the way women have been treated (no need to describe - just imagine a supremely heavy-handed misogynistic society, it's everything you imagine). The next words in the People's Approved Text are "They care only for the safety and well-being of Mersailles’s people." I know that this is not the intended reading, and I don't think I am overly cynical when I say that this wording feels extra fake and precisely the kind of propaganda-speak you might expect. And I'm not just nitpicking text that is in the book but not in-universe. This is text from the new Cinderella text, in-universe!

The book felt like it needed another major round of editing, to take out all the repetitions. It felt like a draft of the story, where you sit down and just try to get all the words out, so you repeat things, you have the characters demonstrate and then reiterate what they said or felt, just the raw brain-dump. This is tedious to read. I don't need someone to spoonfeed me the knowledge that "Sophia is frustrated" in the narration when she's just angrily told someone exactly why she's upset. This should have been cut!

While I hate to harp on this, I also did think that the protagonist was not particularly well-suited for her role. She kept talking loudly about how much she hated everything. This is a society where dissent is usually punished with immediate death! She, the most powerless person, is openly and loudly talking while at the palace about how she hates it and they should run away! Erin shushes her, but come on. The world warps around the protagonist because it needs to. Some modicum of bravery, or cunning, would be useful for a protagonist who has to go up against impossible odds and comes from a very repressive society, surely?

Finally, there's such a leadenness to the entire book because it's so unoriginal. It's a story of overthrowing the evil monarchy and there are so many recycled elements, both from a plot point and from the magical worldbuilding part. The revelation that Prince Charming is sucking the life out of the people he arrests - that's why young people arrested and killed have corpses that appear super old - was something I saw coming from the beginning of the book; the author goes on to drop other super cryptic hints about how there's a big flash of light when this happens, and so on.

AHHHH

1/10

(Cross-post: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/202367.html)

a short fannish year in review

2022-01-04T05:16:27Z

I don't really have much to say for fannish year writing wrap up, except that in 2021 I finally wrote a fic that was not for an exchange. For the first time since 2009! I would link it but I actually put it under a sock and the anon comm >_> But I am really happy with it. It has a whole bunch of private bookmarks! It was really freeing to write without having to think about someone reading it, and I think my decade of not posting anything except a yearly yuletide fic (and in recent years, not even that) made me forget that it was possible to write something and post it and just enjoy what engagement I get. It's probably all the neurotic worrying about and thinking about reception that made writing dry up (okay, also real life and my disposition towards reading books, to be fair). I wrote two fics this year! I wrote 1 in 2020, 0 in 2019, 0 in 2018, 1 in 2017, 0 in 2016...

I did watch a lot of the D+ shows (thanks anticyclone for being my watch buddy and keeping me on track!) We watched Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, What If?, and Hawkeye. I enjoyed them all! I think overall enjoyment, I loved F&WS the most. It was so enjoyable in characterization and that's really what I care about here - I have other preferences in different media, but once I care enough to follow along all these movies, I absolutely care about characterization most, and F&WS nailed that so well. FFA discussion threads were incredibly fun - I've never been active in the fannish space that way before (always with the book fandoms) and it was amazing. So many fun ideas being thrown about and squeeing over the small details. Thank you for the Winter Soldier Bucky. And of course, I developed a massive crush on Daniel Brühl through it, and watched a bunch more good things because of it. Loki was fun, What If? was fun. I should probably write up a little bit about Hawkeye and I think that it had the most satisfying conclusion - most of the D+ shows really fell down on the conclusions, IMO.

I also finished watching Agent Carter. I watched S1 back in 2016 and never got round to the second season, but again, having a watch buddy kept me on track. We started in Oct and went solidly for several months. I really, really loved it. PEGGY!!

I won't go into detail about reading since I should probably post about it in more depth, but fannishly, I think my mind got eaten by the Taltos books, and OMG thank you so much sholio and hamsterwoman for all the discussion. Honestly, what really got me online ages ago was books - I didn't start on LJ or this corner of fandom, I started on this weird forum about Diana Gabaldon books mostly populated by the kind of older ladies that talk about their DH/DS/DD and wine - and although I've sorta learned to watch and appreciate TV and movies, I really care about books. And screaming about various things that happen in them :D
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/201954.html.

Dzur and Jhegaala

2021-11-09T14:42:06Z

Two very different books set at rather different times!

I realized when I was reading Jhegaala that I have no idea what a jhegaala is like, and honestly...I'm still confused. All I'm clear on is the metamorphosis but um, I'm not even sure what the bodyplan is like. Some of the animals are just regular Earth animals, some are analogous, some are mythical creatures, and the jhegaala is just confusing.

Also, I've come to realize that the omnibuses really change my behaviour when it comes to reading. I get what I think of as book hangovers, so consumed with the just-read book that I don't want to start another book, even when I know I'll enjoy it. I also definitely have this inertia where I'll keep reading something even though I don't like it that much, but I'm making progress and every time I open my reading app, it's already open and it's not that bad. (This is how I read all the Michael Scott Rohan books. My opinion kept sliding but I was midway through the book and trilogy already...) I also sometimes feel like I need a certain emotional energy to get started on a new book - to get accustomed to and learn the characters and setting. But when it's an omnibus, I don't even have to open a new file. It doesn't feel like a new book, really. I feel the pressure of "just finish the book" push me over the threshold of energy required to start the new book.

Which is to say, I read Dzur and Jhegaala in two days because they were in one volume. I do like them a lot but I also think the omnibus structure is pushing me to read them faster!

*Thank you, Brust, for starting us right off where Issola ended, and giving such a mouth-watering series of descriptions of food.

*Vlad's not just hungry, he's genuinely a foodie.

*I wonder if Loiosh gets to hear all of Vlad's thoughts on food. No wonder Loiosh is so sarcastic. But you know, Loiosh is also living large on all the amazingly tasty things Vlad gets to eat. I also love that Loiosh will pick up food with one claw and wipe his mouth on his wing. How adorable and yes, such good table manners! It makes me think of parrots who are really dexterous and will hold food to eat.
Look at this!
Except just imagine him being all leathery and scaly instead.

*OH MY GOD MARIO APPEARS!!!!!

*How can there be so many shocks, 11 books in?

*In retrospect, his appearance throws light on Kiera's comment in Orca, which is that while she agreed with Vlad's sentiments, she didn't share his superstitious fear of Mario. She knows he is still alive and is a real Dragaeran!!!!!

*Mario and ALIERA!? I'm sorry there's only so much I can take at once. WHAT

*Even without in-text proof, I feel quite positive saying that Vlad has mentioned Mario's name to Aliera many times, he's practically a deity to invoke superstitiously, has she just been laughing about this to herself the entire time

*Aliera's stated positions on assassins was always suspect, what with the being friends with Vlad thing, but Aliera, really. She's been Dragon heir for ages! LOL

*Vlad can't handle it when Dragaerans aren't all, like, Orca punks. He's astonished by Telnan and Daymar and even Morrolan. Oh Vlad.

*Telnan's explanation for how he chose a cooler name in Dragaeran is adorable. The Serioli name sounds very technical.

“Okay, one for you. But, Kiera, the Jhereg is after me. They want it Morganti. I can’t—”
“I know.”
“—get other people involved in this.”
“What would you do if someone were threatening Morrolan with a Morganti weapon?”
“Laugh at the stupid son-of-a-bitch.”
“Vlad—”
“All right, all right. But—”
“Do you know that Kragar has sent a message to Aliera?”
I blinked. “My word. Has he indeed?”
“He wants to know how to reach you, so he can offer to help.”
“I didn’t think he had that much nerve.”
“He does.”
“I mean, the nerve to risk a snub from Aliera.”
*This exchange is gold. I'm with Vlad on the response to someone attempting to attack Morrolan, and lol @ the comment about Kragar.

*Kragar had a tunnel installed!!!! In case Vlad came back!!! Then he sassed Vlad about his witch lab.

*Also lol @ Vlad asking Kragar how he managed to give orders, and Kragar saying that he wrote a lot of notes. This tickles me. Like someone who just sits behind a desk and types a thousand emails to direct his army. I suppose Kragar can also appear invisibly occasionally and stab if necessary, which probably increases his reputation.

*Kragar's note to Vlad reads like a telegram, which I enjoy.

“Right. How have you taken to running things?”
“I like the money.”
“Yeah, that part is nice. Any problems?”
“Yeah. Finding someone so stupid that he’s willing to do for me what I always did for you.”
Kragar really did a lot for Vlad. So much legwork!

*Vlad's sense of betrayal as Kragar reveals he's a) known about Mario the entire time and b) has been working as Mario's business agent, for ninety years, is hilarious. Not to mention the fact that Kragar probably feels ninety years is "quite recent" and it's longer than Easterners mostly live. Eesh. Kragar's probably been working for/with Mario longer than Noish-pa's been alive!

*Awwww all the Kragar and Vlad exchanges make me feel all warm and fuzzy. They really care about each other! Vlad isn't worried about Kragar betraying him! Kragar is willing to help out and risk danger, and Vlad doesn't want to take up his offer of help if it's going to get Kragar killed! And I loved that they tossed around ideas together, or rather, Vlad thought of plans and then Kragar punched holes into them to see if they stood up.

*Vlad F I N A L L Y meets his son oh my GOD

*We also learn that Aliera has been helping Cawti out with the birth (but probably lots of other things - they seem to be in contact pretty regularly). Having sorcery around for childbirth seems even better than having our pharmaceutical painkillers and modern medicine, I think, since Aliera can also perform magic up to and including necromancy.

*Aww, Vlad admits that he's into having friends (unlike Dzur) and he names a whole swath of them, practically all Dragaerans.

*Aww, I'm so glad we got to see more of Noish-pa. I'm unreasonably fond of him too.

*It was cool to see the East, and I love that Vlad isn't used to the sun. He goes to sleep without closing the shutters and then is irritated that the sun wakes him up way too early with what he calls "a horrid light in my eyes" (which...not inaccurate), and then he spends a bunch of time thinking about shutters, scattered through the rest of the book. Plus he's weirded out by how dark the night is, thinks about buying a hat...it's gotta be a big adjustment.

*Vlad really is no horseman, is he? He sings paeans to the extremely placid and slow mare that he has to ride. It's a good thing he likes walking so much, though at least he has the anti-sickness amulet that Noish-pa made him, though little good it does him at the moment...

Loiosh was on my left shoulder, Rocza on my right, and they both scanned the room, fully alert for assassins, hostile citizens, or pieces of sausage that had been left on the floor.
:D

*I also tried to read this with google translate open between Hungarian <-> English and there are some - like the hostess of the Cellar Mouse calls it the "nawp" which I am pretty sure is the phonetic translation of the Hungarian word for sun ("nap") in English.

*Love the little detail that there are professional teleporting outfits where they have sorcerers that know everywhere, so they can teleport you to where you want to go even if you don't know the place or have the sorcerous ability. Swap the airline/train/bus/etc industry for the teleporting industry!

*For some reason, I'm tickled by the conversation about the names of the inns. Vlad doesn't talk to anyone about the inns so he just guesses the names from the painted pictures on the inn signs. Someone says the name of the Cellar Mouse so he knows that one. But the fact he calls the other inn the Pointy Hat mentally (amazing name) and only finds out at the end of the novel it's called Inchay's (after the owner) is for some reason so entertaining. I don't know. It's part and parcel of the general "show don't tell" aspect of the books, and it also bucks the usual trend in fantasy where all taverns are named things like the White Hart.

*So I guess this another of the occasions where Vlad is held by someone who is not the Empire. Oof. I guess this is also where he lost the finger, though honestly my impressions of the timeline are now very confused - Athyra takes place after, right? (My confusion about the the timeline I feel is solidly not my fault though re-reading hasn't really helped lol - I'll consult that timeline later). The torture parts were more detailed than the incident in Teckla, but it was really the long recovery and the fact he could barely talk after this that made it feel so alarming, again.

“I know. But, Loiosh, why hasn’t he done so already? Why am I still breathing?”
“Boss, can we please talk about this after we’re out of town? I’m too old to learn to hunt for myself.”
Awww. Loiosh attempts to convince Vlad to leave Burz like ten times throughout this book, which is unusual for him. And he's so worried when Vlad is being tortured :(

A witch will send an imp down your throat to your heart. The imp leaves red footprints on the lips.”
There were some problems with that—the first being that you can’t really get to the heart from the throat (you pick up a bit of anatomy when you kill people for a living), the second being that I don’t believe in imps.
But not that much anatomy because Vlad prefers to impale through the eye...

*I enjoyed the interlude where Vlad sees through Loiosh's eyes! Actually, since Vlad is so isolated in this book, there's lots of good Loiosh and Vlad interaction.

*This is a very Athyra like book, where it takes place in a completely different place with a new cast of characters we don't know at all, and a very twisty plot like Yendi.

Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/201450.html.

Issola - Steven Brust

2021-10-15T05:08:18Z

Another one I really enjoyed. Attempting to talk about involves so many spoilers though so:

*NOOOO that's not okay Steven Brust! How dare!!

*I had such a bad feeling as soon as Lady Teldra stabbed the Jenoine. It was just written in a way that was screaming something really awful was about to happen. Plus it happened after Morrolan was killed so the stakes were definitely going to be higher. What a way to go, but how dare this happen to Lady Teldra! I really liked her, even back when we only knew she was the person greeting Vlad at the door (and discomfiting him by being so nice and even convincing him she was sincere about welcoming him). How! Dare!

*I absolutely loved that Lady Teldra managed to track him down in the woods. OK, she had Sethra's help, but still. I loved that she knew to stop well before she freaked out Vlad enough to make him do something he'd regret. Honestly the whole sequence before they get to Dzur Mountain is so great.

*Loiosh really respects Sethra and let her scratch his ears! Is this because she also served him a dead teckla that one time? :D

*Super interesting about the Paths of the Dead and their purpose. It also makes me wonder why Loraan was returned as undead (though that might also have been Blackwand's doing - it was Morrolan who killed him).

*Vlad sasses Sethra so so much, even more than usual. Maybe all the enforced solitude in the woods has done this to him. After all, Loiosh has him beat in the sarcasm department. But Vlad! Don't roll your eyes at the explanation is the one you demanded yourself! lol

*There's no way in hell Vlad would hear that Morrolan and Aliera were captured and needed help, and not go and help them. Stop fighting yourself and just take Sethra's suggestion to help them!

“That’s why we were taken,” said Aliera, giving me a look. “In order to coerce Vlad into doing what they want.”

“You’d think,” said Morrolan, “that if that was true, they’d have taken Cawti, or better yet—” He broke off abruptly and scowled.

This is clearly a reference to Vlad's son which he still has no idea about, yes?! Morrolan knows about him, clearly! oh my gOD

*We got so much good backstory!!

*Morrolan's backstory in the East! Oh my god he thought he was an Easterner? He was raised by them because his parents died? He thought he was just a freakishly tall human? hahahahaha oh my god. I assume that Dragaerans mostly grow physically as quickly as Easterners do, although of course Dragaerans consider eg 90 year olds to be young kids and 500 to be young adults, but it's not like Vlad feels Savn to be physically child sized or anything.

*Awwww

She nodded. “His name at the time was Fenarian: Sötétcsilleg. ‘Morrolan’ is just the same thing, rendered into the ancient tongue of the Dragon.”

Google Translate says this is Hungarian (as is all the Fenarian in these books, as far as I can tell) for Dark Star. Which is wonderful.

*This is pretty sad though, because Morrolan definitely outlived his foster parents :( While he was very young, by Dragaeran standards.

*Lady Teldra and Morrolan met in the East! Morrolan hired her to make up for his flaws, which yes, is pretty far-sighted of him, considering how old he is.

*I am dying at the recounting of Morrolan charging up Dzur Mountain because Sethra didn't pay tribute and Dzur Mountain is within his fief - and Vlad wondering but scared to ask whether in present day, Sethra pays Morrolan anything. I'm not sure which is funnier, honestly.

*I loved that Loiosh called himself cute (yes, yes you are!!) while the rest of them are attempting to digest the idea that the Jenoine barely consider them a threat, like a kitten playing with a string, cute, hardly worth planning around.

[Lady Teldra:] “I am still considering the matter and trying to understand, but it seems to me that they spoke to me—insofar as I could perceive tone—in the tone one might use to, well, a greeterbird. They were amused that I could form any sort of coherent thought; they think we’re cute.”

“Cute,” said Aliera e’Kieron.

“Cute,” said Morrolan e’Drien.

“I am cute,” said Loiosh.

*We found out who Drien was!

*I love that when Verra speaks and there are others around, they clearly hear something slightly (or sometimes very) different. It's a great way of illustrating how unlike the Dragaerans and humans she is and the way she can manifest in multiple places, etc.

*Oh my god, Vlad's outburst about Morrolan and Aliera. They do fight a lot and Vlad's been sick of it since about when they rescued Aliera, this has been building up for some time.

*I have questions about Aliera's parentage though. She's the daughter of Verra and Adron? Uhh....how did that even happen?! That's quite the reversal of the usual god and human union configuration.

*I loved the depiction of the outside of the little prison the Jenoine placed them in. It reminds me of the xkcd strip https://xkcd.com/1472/

*We got way more sorcerous/witchcraft explanation! I loved that Aliera filled in the basics and then just said bluntly "Your education was sadly lacking." lmao. For one, he hasn't had 500 years to learn, ok! Also the time of the greatest sorcerous education for him was when he was feeling extremely negatively of Dragaerans. But it was cool to learn more of amorphia - I kind of think of it as antimatter now. It was interesting also to think of the Jenoine thinking so radically different - of how to them physically moving is like spiritwalking, and breaking an illusion to look around is more like moving from places (though Lady Teldra calls this not quite accurate but close). An interesting concept and one that makes the Jeonine satisfyingly alien.

*I love that Lady Teldra learned to speak Jenoine at one point. Also that Morrolan is taken aback that she knows!

*I enjoy the conversation Lady Teldra and Vlad have about courtesy, and I totally broadly agree, though also one of the reasons Vlad survives, which Lady Teldra can't see, is because he's the main character ;)

*Loved this exchange. Sethra is probably exhausted by young people, i.e. the population of the entire world. I absolutely understand why she sits in Dzur Mountain by herself.

“Defense,” said Morrolan like it was something foul. “Why not attack them instead? I’ve always preferred attacking to defending.”
“I know,” said Sethra. “But you are still young, and may yet learn.”

*Aww, I love that Morrolan went down to his weapons storeroom, filled up a bag of daggers, and gave Vlad the bag because he knew Vlad had depleted his and would probably be feeling quite at sea without them.

I moaned softly. Sethra said, “Is the arm beginning to hurt?”

“No,” said Aliera. “That’s his moan of contentment after a good meal.”

“Now, how would you know that?” I asked her.

She gave me an inscrutable smile that she must have learned from Morrolan. I grunted and drank some more, and enjoyed the transitory sense of contentment I was feeling.

*I love that Aliera knows this! You can read between the lines at how many meals they've all had together (and food matters a lot to Vlad!)

*Some insane amounts of power brought to bear at the battle at the end! Wow. And here's Vlad again (this is the second time in this book alone) where he is hanging back, feeling outclassed and without a specific role, jumping in because he feels bad or he needs to help. Oh, Vlad.

*I really enjoyed how so many threads about the Great Weapons and Morganti weapons came together. Especially the Serioli's remark, when Morrolan and Vlad show up - the Serioli says "why do you only introduce me to 2 out of 5 of your party? Because one of them is half-there?" It's Morrolan, Vlad, Loiosh, and then Blackwand and Spellbreaker, half of the weapon. It makes me wonder who's in Pathfinder and Iceflame and Blackwand.

*Though I'm still a little unsure of this line: "and that’s how Pathfinder had saved Aliera’s life". I assume this refers to the time they were working to assassinate Mellar and they trick him into stabbing Aliera with a Morganti dagger. The sentience of Pathfinder? Can't really tell.

*I love that the Jhereg's threat of assassination via Morganti dagger now is like, nothing for him. Yeah, I don't think Morrolan or Aliera or Sethra are that concerned about Morganti weapons being aimed at them, either. And I absolutely love that he immediately has himself teleported to Valabar's to have a nice meal. RELATABLE
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/200878.html.

Athyra, Orca, Dragon

2021-09-29T20:39:05Z

CAN'T STOP WON'T STOP

I think since I read Phoenix I have read the next seven books in a row, and it's only taking this long because I couldn't get hold of these four for a bit (thanks again hamsterwoman for getting me copies!!) I'm trying to pace myself but it's hard.

*It was both interesting and disappointing to get the story through Savn. I think Savn is an interesting narrator, especially since most of the audience that we've been interacting with so far looks down on the Teckla, with the exception of Kelly's group. His perspective is also severely limited because of his life circumstances and how much he's been exposed to - he's never left his home, and despite his 90 years of age (probably triple or quadruple Vlad's) has almost certainly seen far less than Vlad has. I do really like Vlad's narration though - it's one of the big draws of the series - and this book only shows an outside view of him.

*I also liked Rocza's perspective. Loiosh's is super clear in the books. He's clearly sentient and at least as sharp as a human in communication, even from the very start. The first thing Vlad hears from Loiosh when Loiosh had just hatched was the word "mama", not a feeling but a clear word, and Loiosh is super sarcastic and perceptive. Rocza, on the other hand, has no such connection to Vlad, and obviously finds Vlad's motivations baffling. It's interesting because the connection was clear enough that Rocza was able to understand Vlad's desperate cry for help in his fight with Mellar, but I think Vlad was using witchcraft at that point.

*Both of these two perspectives made it a very different book from the previous ones. A lot of the fun of the books is the contrast between what the text says and what it means, and this is another facet of it. I do miss Vlad's perspective (how surprising!) and in some cases Savn's narration is even more obscure than Vlad's. Vlad will often omit facts or elide them, but in Savn's case, Savn's sometimes being deceived wholesale, like the time Vlad takes him to the caves to show him sorcery, but Vlad just wanted to take a look around the cave and see if it led to Loraan, so he just puts Savn to sleep.

*Fird, the fruit seller, has an accent/speech from a different part of the country, and I enjoyed how it was rendered by Savn. Instead of phonetic changes, it's scrambled word-order and verb agreements, which is at least novel. Sometimes a bit hard to understand, but that's ok, he's not a huge character.

*Savn and his village's thoughts on the jhereg are pretty interesting. I'm so used to Loiosh because of course we get to hear him talk to Vlad all the time, but they definitely are kind of scary. Everyone seems to be aware that they are poisonous - the way we know that some snakes are, I guess.

*Savn's also pretty brave, all things considered. Vlad got a long time to 'toughen up', so to speak - getting beat up for a long time, getting angry, getting trained by his grandfather, all that, plus his father and his grandfather both think that they don't deserve this kind of treatment - his grandfather because he accepts his identity as a human and an Easterner, his father because he tries to assimilate into Dragaera and buys the citizenship for himself and his son. Savn doesn't have any of that, but he's able to do surgery on his own master and Vlad too, walk up to Loraan's castle, eventually turn on Loraan...that's a lot.

*OK I have to scream about the KIERA IS SETHRA reveal first. I already went and yelled about it with sholio on discord but I have to do it again because OH MY GOD!!! I knew there was something coming because of some comments I read, but I had no idea. My mind is blown. I'm still trying to cope.

*I started thinking back to some of the information we've gotten about Kiera in the preceding books (ebooks being searchable is awesome). There's of course the time Kiera gave Vlad the blood of a goddess incident (I assume this is Verra's blood). There's that time when Vlad was fighting the turf war with Laris, and Morrolan quietly gave him a huge amount of cash to support him secretly, and Kiera also shows up with a gem she admitted she got from Sethra. Got from Sethra, more like Sethra walked into her own treasury, took out a gem, turned herself into Kiera, and then teleported to Adrilankha to give it to Vlad, oh my god. And there's also that time where Vlad is explaining the kinds of assassinations that exist (from the death as a warning, death that's not revivifiable, and the Morganti soul-killing deaths). He says that he was killed as a warning once, and Kiera found his body in the gutter in time and had Sethra revive him. AHHH

*I also kind of started shipping Kiera/Vlad but now with the reveal I don't know how to feel yet. I still think of them as two separate people.

*This explains why Kiera doesn't do psionic contact I suppose.

*I can't believe Kiera's gotten away with this. I mean, it's Sethra and everyone's scared of her abilities for good reason, so I guess it shouldn't be surprising she can cover her tracks well, plus she as Kiera usually doesn't work with anyone. But she's a Dragon. Working for the Jhereg part time. I think both councils would blow their tops if they found out.

*VLAD HAS A SON AND DOESN'T KNOW. CAWTI CAN'T GET IN CONTACT WITH HIM. Ahhhhh!!

*Loiosh got hurt :( Poor Loiosh, and poor Vlad, who didn't know what to do about it, except to bandage him and try to run back to shelter.

*I also really really enjoyed reading Kiera's perspective. She is really good at what she does and she observes things that Vlad doesn't - and/or says them, maybe. I loved hearing her break down how she does her stealing, and how she says to herself to slow down, you're the best thief in the Empire because you're careful. Her metaphorical description of the sorcery (making a spider to swallow the little watcher-sorcery hanging out in the corner) was also super interesting.

*Kiera also has no compunctions about teleporting. Vlad hates them because he's not very good with sorcery and they make him sick and at this stage he's wearing the Phoenix stones to prevent the Jhereg from finding him. But she's obviously an insane sorcerer, and a Dragaeran, so she teleports back and forth from Northport to Adrilankha to that cottage with no hesitation, crossing ground at a speed that is sort of ridiculous to think about.

*Most modern governments have a national bank as the lender of last resort, and also monetary and fiscal policy (and okay, fiat money so printing is possible), but I guess the Empire is more mercantile. I did laugh at this though:
“Maybe. But maybe not. I don’t know how banks operate, but they’re bound to generate immense amounts of paperwork, and—”
Yes, you have no idea. LOL

*I can't imagine how much paperwork Vlad had to read and sort through. My eyes hurt just thinking about it.

*Vlad has a conversation with Kiera about how during the Dragon-Jhereg war (the first one) the Jhereg went for the leaders and slaughtered them ASAP, and how Sethra Lavode declared herself the leader then sat at Dzur Mountain and took out any assassin who tried to get at her. Everything about this conversation is hilarious. Vlad asks if Kiera has ever been to Dzur Mountain and Kiera just shrugs. He's explaining to Kiera Sethra's strategies....

*I love that in the interludes, Cawti makes Kiera tell her if Loiosh is okay before going on. Aw. That's also detail I'd need immediately, chronological order be damned.

*I enjoyed Hwdf Rjaanci. She's grossed out by Vlad (the Dragaerans in general seem to find Easterners unpleasantly hairy, Kiera's surprised by his chest when she goes to look at the bandaging) but also doesn't want to hurt Vlad's feelings. Which, I mean, he is helping make sure she's not evicted...but he also came by and dumped a patient on her for that service, so I guess it's a net zero there.

Hooray it's back to the time when Vlad was in the Organization but before the whole Mellar incident!

*I had a sudden thought - grey and black are the Jhereg colours, and black is the colour of sorcery (see Castle Black and Vlad's many feelings on how Morrolan has named his castle, lol). But this book also mentions that grey is the colour of death/mourning. I can't help but think the Jhereg colours are a reference to the respective businesses - of the Right Hand and Left Hand. OK, I suppose that the Right Hand does more than just assassinations but it's a big part of the business!

*We found out how Morrolan hired Vlad to be his security consultant. I am losing it at the extremely formal note that Morrolan sent Vlad, as well as the postscript which is almost certainly not sarcastic, but without knowing Morrolan would almost certainly be read that way: "P.S.: You expressed a preference for a formal invitation over our last method of asking for your help; I hope this meets with your approval — M." It's so excellent because Vlad himself speaks in a very modern slangy way and Morrolan's note might keep decent company with a Victorian's note.

*Oh man watching Vlad go to war fully intending to, as he says, bug out before any action starts...and then go through and fight like five engagements is...Vlad, you lie to yourself so much. He does this so many times Loiosh gives up on mocking him about it! He says he hates Dragons and Dragaerans and then refuses to run for his life. At least the Dragons in his cohort genuinely have a taste for military life and are getting things out of it all; Vlad is so unsuited for all this. He's sticking it out because he doesn't want to appear afraid in front of them...but also because he has already developed fellow-feeling for his messmates and doesn't want to ditch them.

*I only realized in this novel that Castle Black isn't floating in the air on a chunk of rock like a floating island. I think his courtyard is made of some kind of hardened air, so you don't fall through, but it's also clear? This explains why (as a queasy Vlad attempts to get himself oriented again) he keeps commenting on the ground far below him. That's terrifying. I wonder if Morrolan has a garden or anything at the back?

*I couldn't remember a single idea of mine that [Kragar] hadn't thrown cold water on, nor a single one that he hadn't backed me on to the hilt—literally, in some cases.
Awwww.

*Our introduction to Daymar! He's such a space cadet. I also loved the scene where after Vlad refused to tell Daymar what his reasons were, refused to let Daymar probe his mind to figure out why Vlad found the Morganti weapons so affecting, so Daymar just up and mind-probed Kragar, and Vlad lost it on Daymar. I also love that Daymar almost followed Vlad and Kragar back to the office and Kragar apparently had to tell Daymar to not do it.

*Loiosh is such a helpful companion to Vlad. Like he knows instantly what's going on, sorcerously, but also functions as eyes (and ears) in the sky, Vlad never has to worry he's being secretly mind-probed or influenced. It makes me wonder how Ambrus interacts with Noish-pa. Ambrus wouldn't have the same "eye in the sky" ability that Loiosh can employ so well, but Noish-pa also doesn't assassinate people for a living, so probably Ambrus works great for him.

*I also love that this occurs:
"Boss! Boss! You can stand up now!"
It's always embarrassing to panic in front of Loiosh.
Vlad has been sealed up in wine barrels for hours on end and unloaded off boats in completely undignified ways, spent nights sneaking into cellars and hiding all night in the storage area, spent hours cramped in doorways, alleyways, etc, all in the regular service of his profession. How does he have embarrassment left.

*I also loved the callback at the end when he calls Loiosh Lieutenant of the First Jhereg Assassins company and by this point Loiosh (who was teasing Vlad about getting that rank way at the beginning of the assignment) is totally unimpressed and just goes, whatever.

*"Never mind," I said. "If something is missing and we don't know how, Kiera took it."
"Then what?" put in Kragar.
"That's easy. We give up and report failure, which I should have done already."
LOL

*The visit to the Serioli was also really interesting. They regard the Great Weapons as sentient beings also and I suppose Spellbreaker is - incomplete? Morrolan got critiqued on his translation from Serioli to Dragaeran. It's interesting the Serioli don't see time the way we (or the Dragaerans) do.

*Vlad at one point eats six or seven biscuits a meal, which he says just goes to show how low the human animal can be reduced, but after his first attempted drink of the army's coffee, he never tries it again. He chokes down his biscuits with water for the rest of that storyline. lol

*Kragar says he did research into Vlad before agreeing to work for him. I'm now wondering how much he found out. He knows where Vlad's family is from...I wonder if he's spied on Noish-pa?? Does he know more about Vlad's father than Vlad? (Possibly)
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/200571.html.

awkward emails

2021-09-22T15:18:24Z

I think of this excerpt every time I struggle to write an email at work. I try to get around the issue of "this is going to be so insulting" by trying to find the perfect wording and the truth is just the truth, there's not much I can do with how I convey it.

It was only when, in her own room after Hall, she set about writing to Peter, that she realized how awkward her own task was going to be. To put down a brief explanation of her own acquaintance with Lord Saint-George and a reassuring account of his accident was child’s play. The difficulties began with the matter of the young man’s finances. Her first draft ran easily; it was slightly humorous and rather gave the benefactor to understand that his precious balms were calculated to break the recipient’s head, where other agents had not already broken it. She rather enjoyed writing this one. On reading it over, she was disappointed to find that it had an air of officious impertinence. She tore it up.

The students were making a vast noise of trampling and laughter in the corridor. Harriet briefly cursed them and tried again.

The second draft began stiffly: “Dear Peter—I am writing on behalf of your nephew, who has unfortunately—”

This one, when finished, conveyed the impression that she disapproved strongly of uncle and nephew alike, and was anxious to dissociate herself as far as possible from their affairs.

She tore it up, cursed the students again and made a third draft.

This, when completed, turned out to be a moving, and indeed, powerful piece of special pleading on the young sinner’s behalf, but contained remarkably little of the gratitude and repentance which she had been instructed to convey. The fourth draft, erring in the opposite direction, was merely fulsome.

“What the devil is the matter with me?” she said aloud. “(Damn those noisy brats!) Why can’t I write a straightforward piece of English on a set subject?”

When she had once formulated the difficulty in this plain question, the detached intellect bent meekly to its academic task and produced the answer.

“Because, however you put it, all this is going to hurt his pride damnably.”

Answer adjudged correct.

What she had to say, stripped of its verbiage, was: Your nephew has been behaving foolishly and dishonestly, and I know it; he gets on badly with his parents, and I know that, too; he has taken me into his confidence and, what is more, into yours, where I have no right to be; in fact, I know a great many things you would rather I did not know, and you can’t lift a hand to prevent it.

In fact, for the first time in their acquaintance, she had the upper hand of Peter Wimsey, and could rub his aristocratic nose in the dirt if she wanted to. Since she had been looking for such an opportunity for five years, it would be odd if she did not hasten to take advantage of it.

Slowly and with extreme pains, she started on Draft No. 5.

Dorothy L Sayers, Gaudy Night.

Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/200282.html.

Book of Jhereg

2021-09-22T04:24:06Z

I finished the Book of Jhereg (Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla) a few weeks back and just realized I forgot to post about them here.

The library does not have books 6,7,8 or 9, despite having all the books around it, neither ebook nor print. I'm not sure why and this isn't the first time this library system (big city decent budget) has had these kinds of issues - their SF/F acquisitions seems to be very patchwork. I'm not expecting them to have super obscure or old titles, but this is neither. Also they got all the other books around them! I put in a request for the two as omnibuses and they were approved right away, so I'll read them soon.

On to the thoughts! I really enjoyed them, one of the reasons I'm mad again at acquisitions is I wanted to just keep reading, damn it.

*So much more of Morrolan, Vlad, Aliera and Sethra's friendship and the whole dynamic! There's a lot more backstory in terms of the way Dragon and Jhereg Houses relate and why, and it makes the whole friend thing even better. Especially in Jhereg when they are trying to deal with the Mellar situation.

*That Dragon-Jhereg war, whew. No wonder everyone is alarmed at it happening, but I definitely see why the Demon would see it differently than the Dragonlords - totally different priorities and ways of looking at the world, not to mention associating with extremely different people. There's definitely plenty of plotting and competition among the Dragons, but it's a very different mentality that a mob boss would have, since he knows he stabbed his way up and must be ever-lastingly aware that under him, others are trying to do the same.

*I really like...I mean...pretty much all the characters, but shout out to Aliera, who is really hot-tempered. Normally this is a character flaw but I really like characters who are just really determined, especially female characters who don't often to be just completely dead-set on things.

*I'm enjoying the filling in background as well. In Phoenix after Vlad pisses off most of the Organization, he heads to Castle Black, and Kragar makes the comment that while it's really hard to dig someone out of there...they've been successful. Now I know what that refers to - the whole complicated Mellar plot!

*The account of Vlad's acquisition of Loiosh's egg! So the bargain was with Loiosh's mother, and then Vlad literally reared him from an egg. Oh my god, this is adorable. Vlad was so worried about it and kept the egg on his person for weeks, and felt murderous rage when he thought someone damaged the egg. Loiosh panicking when hatching (seriously, can you imagine? baby birds must be so confused) and calling Vlad mama! Vlad not having anything in the apartment to feed Loiosh, even though he's been carrying an egg around, and he should have expected a jhereg to hatch out of any day (so he fed it some milk by putting Loiosh's entire face into the dish, and then for whatever reason also had a hawk wing in his kitchen?)

*Oh my god Morrolan died briefly!! AHH!! He was fine but seriously, the death thing is alarming.

*I have sort of sorted out all of the various Jhereg bosses that Vlad has worked for/on, but man, it's confusing. There are so many names and Vlad just throws the names out like you know what he's talking about, because he's relating it all very casually, so the timelines are also all over the place. The fact we don't know Tagichatn or whatever's name because Vlad never bothered to learn it is hilarious though.

*I enjoy all the little structural conceits! Like in Yendi how Vlad sprinkles a few jokes on the same theme (how many HOUSE does it take to sharpen a sword?) I really enjoyed in Teckla the usage of the tailor's order and how each item's damage is revealed in the chapter. I'll have to re-read and look specifically for those - it's not like the text draws attention to it, sometimes the cut or abrasion happens in a few words like any other action in a novel.

*Teckla was definitely painful to read. I feel neutral about the getting-together part of Cawti and Vlad, but it happened so fast and most of it was offscreen since I guess Vlad didn't want to narrate it. Their splitting up is also quite off the page - they keep talking and Vlad doesn't record those conversations, but you can tell they're both trying but they're just such different people now. I respected that that was the conclusion Vlad came to, though - sad and upset it was ending, but not at Cawti. I don't really enjoy reading books that wallow in the feelings of resentment.

*The torture scene in Teckla, woof. It's very understated but Vlad's subsequent actions make it so clear how bad it was. Cawti is so concerned :(

*As well, the time just preceding that when he's so angry and off kilter he just goes wandering about without any protection. Eek.

*On a lighter note, I do enjoy the parts where Vlad is thinking about why Sethra and Aliera etc put up with him, and says things like this:
To Sethra, even more than to most Dragaerans, an Easterner’s lifetime was a blink of an eye. Maybe that’s why she was so tolerant of me. (Morrolan’s tolerance was due to having lived among Easterners for many years of his youth, during the Interregnum. Aliera’s tolerance I’ve never understood; I suspect she was just being polite to Morrolan.)
They're your friends, Vlad. F-R-I-E-N-D-S, that's what.

*I love that Loiosh enjoys going to shows. Also going through various restaurant dumpsters.

*Kelly is pretty tedious. Meh.

This entry took ages, I read Athyra last night (thanks to hamsterwoman!) But I'm too tired to write up thoughts about that. Next time!
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/200013.html.

Phoenix: Steven Brust

2021-09-06T02:52:13Z

OK so I finished Phoenix and while I enjoyed Taltos enough to keep reading the next book in the omnibus, reading Phoenix has made me wild to find the other books. I REALLY enjoyed that one.

Incredibly scattered thoughts:

*I've clearly missed a ton about Cawti & Vlad's relationship and even so, that conversation at the end where they attempt to have a conversation again about the two of them was...well, I respected a lot out of Vlad (and honestly - Brust)

*If Kragar betrays Vlad in one of the books I'm gonna be so upset. Melestav :( Nooo

*The names of Vlad's various enforcers gives me great joy. Poor Sticks. Glowbug!

*I am so fond of Loiosh?? Not to mention, I want a dragon who can fly around and poison people and who I can psionically talk to! Life is so unfair. I don't want a pony. I want a dragon. (Dragons that can fly and carry me on their back also acceptable.)

"Two toughs in here waiting for you, boss. We're distracting them, but--yikes!"
"You all right, Loiosh?"
"Near miss, boss."
Why is Loiosh saying yikes adorable??? Also adorable - he called Vlad mama when he was a fledgling I guess but then substituted it for boss once Loiosh grew up.

*The fight scenes were awesome. So much fun. This is absolutely my jam.

*I don't think I ever want to call Vlad's bluff. He's pretty good at backing them up.
"Is there some reason I should answer you?"
"I'll kill you if you don't."
"You'd never make it out of here alive."
"I know."

*Aibynn made me laugh a lot. I love that Vlad honestly had no clue the entire book whether Aibynn was an amazingly good spy or literally just that obsessed with drums. Also Aibynn is obviously based off a real person (with exaggerations) but the combination of the always innocent demeanor, laid back attitude about everything from having to stay somewhere else because assassins are after his only friend in the country or being thrown into jail because a man fell out of a tree near him, and complete focus on drumming, it is so entertaining. Lmao at Sethra and the others examining gold Phoenix stone carefully and trying to figure out how it works and Aibynn answering Morrolan ("what do you call it?") with "In my land, we call it a rock". Probably an annoying character if he appears in every book but for this quantity, so much entertainment.

ANYWAY I have obtained Book of Jhereg, which is apparently Jhereg, Yendi, and Tekla so I'm reading those next!! I'm looking forward to finding out more about the world since I think these two books are further along in the series. I am damning next month's book club and have decided I'm not gonna even bother reading it - it's the Six of Crows book, there are eighty holds on fifty copies, and I haven't enjoyed a YA book (much less a YA book published in the last 10 years) in many years.

I'm mildly annoyed the library does not appear to have e-books of each of the books (how dare!) but I have to cross-reference a bit and check the other local library system. I'm pretty sure main library system has all the books, just some in physical copy. Looks like the e-books are available to buy if the library can't get them in electronic copy.
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/199570.html.

Taltos: Steven Brust

2021-09-02T04:49:10Z

I finished the first half of Book of Taltos which (after some wikipedia-ing) I think was originally published as a novel, and I've got the omnibus, where Taltos is paired with Phoenix. Normally you can just tell from the whole outside packaging but when I read in ebook I have no idea how long anything is and I skip the frontismatter anyway :P

I enjoyed it a lot! It's about Vlad, an Easterner (human) who lives in Dragaera (elf city) and who gets roped into a very dangerous rescue mission with someone he's basically just met.

One thing I really enjoyed is the utter deadpan of the narration, which is first person from Vlad. Especially because he's an assassin. There's so much where Vlad is describing what's going on, and what he thinks is going to happen, it's a ridiculous situation and very dangerous, and then he just goes, "So then I just nailed [killed] him." Everything is so casual, even when it's clearly a ton of work to go about killing his target, or it's life-or-death. I really am into super competent characters, so this was Excellent. Vlad also has a way of understatement at all times, so it's fun to read between the lines and think about what he's actually saying. A lot of what he says isn't what he feels - either because he doesn't want to admit it or he just wants to tell you something entertaining, I suppose. The prose is otherwise pretty light on description and the writing is very transparent/modern - there's not a lot to look at there. The interest is mostly in what happens and how Vlad talks about it, and it was really entertaining.

The other interesting thing was the three storylines - past, present, future. Each chapter is fairly short and mostly has all three happening. It took me until awhile into the book to realize the 'past' parts were gonna show up in each chapter, and then near the end I realized how the 'future' sections linked in. Eventually the 'present' and 'future' sections joined up, and I really enjoyed that. It's gave the book a different dimension and I also think it was a great way to explain something (magic working) which is hard to explain without infodumping and not have it bog down the action, which is reaching a climax at that particular point. I also quite like the device generally - I think the last time I read it was Ancillary Justice (which is exceptional), but where the two lines of the story met was such a great moment, and you really understood what was going on.

Also for some reason I kept reading this at the very end of the day when I was almost asleep so I probably will find a lot more to enjoy in the re-reads. Now reading Phoenix!
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/199287.html.

NPR top 50 SF/F of last decade

2021-08-21T03:47:19Z

NPR posted a Top 50 SF/F books list. Some discussion went round meme critical of the list, but I think it's a pretty decent list of the highlights. Yes, I think I've heard of either the authors or the works listed, but I like SF/F and I hang around people who like and talk about it! If I wanted to know of new books to check out, I wouldn't be going to NPR-writing-for-a-general-audience to ask for it. And thank goodness it's not yet another list where it's the Three Fathers of SF and Lord of the Rings taking up all the slots yet again.

Anyway please see my babbling about the books I have read of the below. Though wow when I actually go through these, I hated a whole bunch of them. I still think it's a good list!

Worlds To Get Lost In
- The Imperial Radch Trilogy by Ann Leckie [judge]
I absolutely love the first book and I think the other two are very good. I've re-read the first many times and there's a lot of things that really gripped me when I first read it - that first realization when you understand how the story with Breq and the story with Justice of Toren + Lt Awn linked up was genuinely so good. I loved the translation convention with the pronouns, I loved how alien the Presger were, I loved the AI oversight.

I think the other two books suffer because they are a change from what the first book is; the scope changes very dramatically. And more importantly, I think Ancillary Justice itself is like lightning in a bottle - even good books find it hard to stand next to them. Personally, while I enjoyed them, I did feel like some traits/objects had become almost flanderized throughout - the custom of tea and gloves and all that, started intruding on the story.

- The Dead Djinn Universe (series) by P. Djélì Clarke
- The Age of Madness Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie

I read Best Served Cold many years ago and hated it so much it kicked Abercrombie all the way to the bottom of the list of "people's books I should read", so that was a no from me. I haven't heard anything to change this opinion in the intervening uh...decade, I think.

- The Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee [judge]
- The Expanse (series) by James S.A. Corey
- The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty
- Teixcalaan (series) by Arkady Martine

Read this, loved it. Again, loved the space opera aspect, I always love a good culture clash, the interesting new tech + conditions of living on station and how it had influenced or interacted with culture. The naming was quite human in a way that SF/F often misses - instead of creating foreign-looking words by inserting letters and implying unusual sounds, it used a different scheme of naming, foreign to English but not elsewhere.

- The Thessaly Trilogy by Jo Walton
- Shades of Magic Trilogy by V.E. Schwab
- The Divine Cities Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett
- The Wormwood Trilogy by Tade Thompson

Words To Get Lost In
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
- Circe by Madeline Miller

I thought this was a good book but I didn't enjoy reading it very much. I wouldn't have read it except my boss read it, liked it (not an SF/F fan at all) and lent it to me, as he thought I'd enjoy it. I don't really enjoy retellings. I think there's joy to be gotten out of recognizing the myth being re-seen through a different lens, but I usually find them frustrating. It feels like the characters are puppets being moved across a stage by a clumsily-hidden hand.

- Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- The Paper Menagerie And Other Stories by Ken Liu
- Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
- Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang
- Olondria (series) by Sofia Samatar
- Her Body And Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado
- The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente

I tried to read this for book club and although I often push through for those, DNF.

Will Take You On A Journey
- The Changeling by Victor Lavalle
- Wayfarers (series) by Becky Chambers
- Binti (series) by Nnedi Okorafor
- Lady Astronaut (series) by Mary Robinette Kowal
- Children of Time (duology) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Have DNF'd this for now, although not angrily. It was very slow starting and I kept feeling like it was a not-very-interesting written up D&D game. But I know it's about interesting arthropods and I really enjoy alien life forms not based on humans and mammals, and I'm planning to attempt this again. I want cool bug alien protagonists!

- Wayward Children (series) by Seanan McGuire

I read Every Heart a Doorway and hated it so much I am unable to shut up about it. Sorry to everyone who I have button-holed about this. I honestly don't understand the redeeming qualities of the book. I have a friend who has very similar taste, with whom I share an almost completely overlapping venn diagram of tastes when it comes to SF/F, actually, and this is the rock we split on. Another book I hated so much I've kicked McGuire all the way to the bottom of the list of books to read (which means, in essence, never again, because of how TBR works).

- The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

Will Mess With Your Head
- Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
- Southern Reach (series) by Jeff Vandermeer
- The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
- The Locked Tomb (series) by Tamsin Muir
- Remembrance of Earth's Past (series) by Cixin Liu
- Machineries of Empire (series) by Yoon Ha Lee

Will Mess With Your Heart
- The Broken Earth (series) by N.K. Jemisin
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar [judge] and Max Gladstone
- The Poppy War Trilogy by R.F. Kuang
- The Masquerade (series) by Seth Dickinson

Really good, really heartbreaking. I love Baru, she's pragmatic to a fault and absolutely dead-set, and I love ruthless protagonists like that, especially female ones. I do wonder if Dickinson and I shared a somewhat similar educational overlap, although he's gone farther than me and is older; some of the cases, concepts, etc, are very familiar, even though we are very different otherwise. These book dance right on my personal limit for grimdarkness. Every decision has to be the most agonizing one, which can get a bit tiring, but I do enjoy that Baru's rather throwing herself at this nigh-impossible mission, so I guess she is setting herself up for it.

- An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
- The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson
- American War by Omar El Akkad
- Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi [judge]
- On Fragile Waves by E. Lily Yu

Will Make You Feel Good
- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

I did not like this at all and found Maia to be a very frustrating protagonist to inhabit headspace with for however many pages this book went on. I just could not care for him. I mean, I know what it's like to be like that, but that's not enjoyable and I get impatient. I don't really enjoy pitying the protagonist, and I'm sure Maia would also hate to be the object of pity. It felt like so much of the interesting worldbuilding or plot was being missed out on because Maia was just miserable all the time in his head. OK great thanks that's definitely why I read SF/F.

- Murderbot (series) by Martha Wells

I do love Murderbot. I enjoy Murderbot's clear uncomfortableness with humans coupled with still caring about them (while still trying to deny it cares about them, even though this is all in Murderbot's head). I love that Murderbot is invisibly facepalming and then attempting to actually fix the situation, I love the different political setups, incorporating more than just the usual empire or monarchy. It's terrifically fun. I've read probably a full dozen of Martha Wells' books and I can't think of one I did not enjoy. I loved Raksura and Fall of Ile-Rien too.

- The Interdependency (series) by John Scalzi
- The Martian by Andy Weir
- Sorcerer to the Crown/The True Queen by Zen Cho
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/199095.html.

The Age of the Cathedrals and three Ngaio Marsh books

2021-08-08T04:40:51Z

I have fallen terribly down on reviewing books but one lesson I have finally learned is that it's better to still do stuff for partial credit than throw one's hands up and totally abandon it, so recent things I have read!

The Age of Cathedrals - Georges Duby
Published in 1981 by Duby, who is a famous French medievalist, the book covers 980-1420, so the period after which the Viking raids began to taper off up until the beginning of the Renaissance in Italy. I read this in translation.

I always find it tough to review non-fiction, since I usually rate fiction just based on enjoyment, but my interest in non-fiction is different. The book definitely reads very different from a book that might be published today, however. Some of the terminology reads very dated; at the beginning of the book Duby calls the society "primitive", which feels like terminology that we've moved away from. It's not wrong, exactly. Thinking about the agricultural infrastructure and technology, the paucity of written sources, etc, it's very different from later medieval periods.

I got quite bogged down in this also - there's an exhausting section in the middle about theology and I confess I have never cared about any theology. Reading about how much effort and medieval scholarship (as in scholarship during the middle ages) went into it just made me frustrated with how inadequately it was grappling with the problems it was trying to solve. It's not that I don't value things that are not rock-solid empirical research. But we're physical beings and many of our problems result from actual physical causes, it's frustrating to see the masters and students attempt to answer questions by trying to square their religious belief with the scraps of translated Classical knowledge - that is, mostly Aristotle. Instead of actually looking at the world around them and testing what they saw. Ahh, I know it's because I've received the legacy of the scientific method and it's much easier to see how valuable feedback can be employed once you can see the system, so I was taught the knowledge that many others had to put together and make coherent, but it's frustrating.

The book is also very French (and Paris) focused. It's hard to judge whether this is justifiable or not. I honestly think a lot of medieval scholarship is very English and French dominated, perhaps because I learned it in an Anglosphere context, or because of the patchiness of data that's available (the English manorial court rolls are especially useful and don't exist elsewhere). Sometimes when Duby kept going on about how Paris or Ile-de-France was so central to Gothic whatever, I wanted to roll my eyes, but OK. I'm sure English books are equally Anglo-centric. And to be fair to Duby, in later eras, as influential artistic things shift to the Italian peninsula, he does acknowledge that.

I did enjoy and find a lot of the book really illuminating though, in drawing conclusions about the way art was made, by whom, in whose interests and how it was guided by those who commissioned it, the way this changed, and so on. I liked that Duby also occasionally said that there were some questions we couldn't answer because there simply wasn't evidence - things like the beliefs of the Cathars/Albigensians are hard to interpret, because their writing was destroyed and of course, the reports of them are all from the orthodox Christianity.

I found this book quite difficult to read in general. I think I'm a very strong reader (lol) and I'm interested in medieval history and this was in English. I honestly think it's the translation from French and some of the dryness of how Duby treated the subject, and finally, some of my unfamiliarity. For example some of his citations were tough to read (I am complaining about French translations but Latin is definitely worse) and/or I had never read them, so the references to Dionysius the Aeropagite I just had to kind of mentally move past, because I've never actually read his writing. I eventually started a strategy of deciding to read X number of pages to make progress, something that I have never done - I usually just like reading, so it's not like an effort is really required.

Death at the Bar, Death in Ecstasy, Surfeit of Lampreys - Ngaio Marsh
Started a Ngaio Marsh kick and this Death at the Bar is my favourite of the three I've read so far. Marsh seems to go for very public murders in her novels - the others like Artists in Crime, Death in Ecstasy, Surfeit of Lampreys - all have their victims perish within actual eyewitness-view or in earshot. The victim in this one is murdered when playing a round of darts as the lights flicker in a storm, and succumbs to cyanide poisoning.

Honestly I'm not into mysteries for the mysteries. I don't really care and I'm usually reading too fast to think about it; I often read these in 1 or 2 sittings. I'm into the characters, the setting, and the prose . I've come to realize my favourite era of English prose is somewhere in the early 20th century. I'm not sure what it is - I enjoy Victorian prose, too, and I've read reams of modern stuff, of course, and liked a ton of that. But somehow the stylings of the 20th century really hit that sweet spot. This is a long way of just saying I really enjoy reading about Alleyn and Fox and the inter-war setting and all that. Death at the Bar has an amazing scene near the end where Fox is poisoned and Alleyn flips out and orders the roomful of suspects downstairs to stay there or be arrested for murder, and drags the pubmaster (where they're staying) upstairs to help save Fox. Look, I'm just very into competence, OK. Also Alleyn keeps calling Fox nicknames like Foxkin, and it's adorable. I enjoy the recurring characters very much.

I found Lampreys to be the weakest of the three, even though it's her tenth, and she definitely improved as she went along. I think it's maybe because I never quite liked any of the Lampreys, despite the POV character in the beginning being Roberta, who is enamoured of them. Also, I did say I don't care that much about the mystery, but I do feel it often chickens out if the murderer in a sea of gentry turns out to be a servant.
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/198893.html.

hawk dinner

2021-05-09T02:58:03Z

I went birding today and saw a bunch of birds (I think about 15-20 species across 3 locations) but to cap everything off, while I was standing in this parking lot in the city center I saw this big red-tailed hawk. There was a ton of robins constantly calling and harassing it, which is what alerted me, so I went and watched it for a bit. Then while I was watching it sit in the tree, it suddenly swooped past me and caught a baby bunny as it tried to dive for cover.

The hawk didn't seem to care I was there, and brought it over to the fence real close to me, so I got a good shot.

I don't think it was dead at this stage, it kept twitching. Poor bunny.

I feel a little bad for the bunny but mostly, admiration for the hawk. It was so fast, it was all over in a second. That's basically a bucket list item for me! I still want to see a hawk catch a bird on the wing, but this is already amazing.
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/198220.html.

SSR Confidential letter

2021-04-30T02:11:16Z

Dear writer:

Thanks so much for writing for me! I'm so excited to see what you write. I absolutely love Agent Carter and am thrilled about the exchange :D

My AO3 name is ivy.

Things that I like: setting, worldbuilding, people having complicated feelings before love, enemies to lovers, arranged marriage, fake dating, having to go undercover for a mission, actual going on missions with no romantic component, forced proximity. Competence is my jam! Also casefic, I love casefic, and since this is the MCU there is also the lovely angle of weird supernatural things happening.

Dislike: I really like the setting of the post-war 40s and would prefer no mundane/modern AUs, but I don't mind canon-divergence. Also, Jack lives - I refuse to believe that gunshot is fatal.

More specific prompts:
Peggy/Jack
I really love how they come from such different places at the start of the show. Specifically I love that Peggy's really, really good at being a spy and investigating cases, and despite an obviously impressive war record, can't get the recognition for it; Jack, while also pretty decent at what he does, is pretending to everyone about happened to Okinawa and his Navy Cross. I absolutely love that both of them realize the true nature of the other during the show and that Jack shared that incredibly damaging and personal story with Peggy - I'm not sure anyone else knows. I also love that both of them are pretty stroppy and they can both dish it and take it - potential for a lot of teasing and banter there!

I would love to see them on some kind of mission together, I feel like they bicker in the office but once it's boots on the ground, they work together flawlessly (Belarus, figuring out what Leviathan wanted to do in New York). What if they have to pretend to be a couple or they're assumed to be one and they agree to keep to it to get the mission done and then oops, feelings happen? Prolonged stressful situation - they burn off some of that adrenaline together. They get captured and one of them cracks at the other getting hurt, which they then have to try to deal with (both in escaping and then confronting their feelings after, or during). More iddy scenarios - their captors force them to do things (intimate or sexual), feelings result!

Peggy/Jack/Daniel + Peggy & Jack & Daniel
I love their dynamic and how they balance each other out. The push-pull and the different ways all three of them relate to each other. Daniel and Peggy are pretty sweet, though they can get confrontational sometimes, they work great. Jack and Daniel have a somewhat sharper one - I love Daniel's sarcasm - but Jack's trying to be nice in S2 and seems to genuinely want to be friends. And Jack and Peggy have a mutual underlying respect but plenty of conflict too. So much good stuff to explore!

Would love to see the three of the go on cases - what if one of them gets separated on a dangerous case and the other two have to work together and worry about the third (maybe reluctantly worrying, trying not to think about it and failing). I love their dynamic post 1x5 Iron Curtain, what with the revelations - suppose Dooley makes them work together! Post canon, SSR -> SHIELD with the three of them? The 40s isn't exactly the greatest time to be in a threesome publicly - are they pretending at work to be just colleagues but actually exchanging barbs that are inside jokes with straight faces? Also see same prompts above from Peggy/Jack!

Peggy & Dottie
I absolutely love Dottie as sort of the dark mirror to Peggy. She's equal to Peggy in the fighting department, she's been trained gruelingly in every way to be the perfect spy in the anglosphere. But the way the two of them acquired these skills couldn't be more difficult - we don't even know how Dottie ended up in the Red Room program. Orphaned? Taken? No idea. But I love that Dottie and Peggy interact so much across the two seasons. Dottie clearly has complicated feelings about Peggy - the way Dottie sneaks into Peggy's room at the Griffith and pokes through everything and tries on Peggy's voice and mannerisms, the way Dottie won't talk to Jack but is wants to play this cat and mouse game with Peggy, it's all so good.

I loved that Peggy broke Dottie out of jail to help them out - I would love any team up of the two of them, reluctant, "one mission only (or so you think)", or maybe even Peggy bringing Dottie in. Dottie is unsurprised that Leviathan has completely dropped her - she's clearly fascinated by Peggy - what if Dottie is brought into the SSR/SHIELD and Peggy acts as her handler? Peggy runs unexpectedly into Dottie while doing something else and they team up, or try to sabotage each other first before deciding to work together. Actual facts about why Dottie was stealing that Arena Club pin/key thing, since the show will never get to tell us ;_;
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/197727.html.

Rush (2013), Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)

2021-04-25T04:57:46Z

Two really good films that I enjoyed hugely the past week - I did not expect this but I am facing facts and I am now a Daniel Brühl fan.

Rush (2013) dir. Ron Howard

Set during the 1976 Formula One season, the movie follows the rivalry between British driver James Hunt and Austrian Niki Lauda. As the season starts, the already existing rivalry is deepened as Lauda pulls ahead in the scores, and Hunt is disqualified for his car not meeting contest parameters. At the race at the German Grand Prix, which is raced despite the dangerous heavy rains, Lauda's car catches fire, and Lauda sustains third-degree burns and is rushed to the hospital. After six weeks, he returns to race in the Italian Grand Prix and comes fourth, while Hunt fails to finish. The championship comes down to the final race in Japan, where Hunt wins the championship over Lauda by a bare point.

Despite my complete disinterest in driving and racing, this was really engrossing. Hunt and Lauda are extremely different personalities - Hunt is brash, aggressive, and emotionally somewhat unstable, using his willingness to take deadly risks on the track to squeeze out victories; Lauda is technically focused and keeps a tight rein on his non-racing activities, and isn't as emotionally tied to the racing. But they're both two men who do, at the highest level, an extremely dangerous sport. At this point, out of the 25 drivers that enter the season, about two die every year.

They're both extremely good drivers and interestingly, their origin stories, defying their families, is very similar. The rivalry is really excellent, and really powers the film - they start off antagonistic and angry, well before they are Formula One, as the movie opens when they race in the lower divisions. I found Hemsworth to be OK - I've enjoyed him in other things like the MCU and the Men in Black reboot, even though that wasn't as well received - but he wasn't as compelling, maybe because in this film, Brühl's performance blew Hemsworth's out of the water. His character arc has so much good stuff in it, and Brühl plays it all so well. There's never any question of technical competence in driving for both of them, they're both exceptional drivers. Lauda defies his grandfather, who cuts him off after Lauda refuses to join the family business, and he buys his way onto a Formula One team. He immediately irritates some on the team by criticizing the car and proposing changes, which do in fact make the car a lot faster. Hunt tries to get at Lauda mentally, but Lauda doesn't care - he has pretty unshakable confidence in his skills as a driver and no amount of insults about his face is going to change that. Lauda has a very understated courtship and then marriage (in contrast to Hunt's very showy wedding, incidentally) and during his honeymoon, has a gorgeous vulnerable moment as he says to his new wife that happiness now gives him something to lose. Then the accident happens, and he's in so much pain with the burns, but he struggles and returns to the track pretty much as soon as he possibly could. The whole range was just so so well done, and I can't believe how much I cared! I could barely watch the hospital stuff, and the mix of determination, fear, etc as he returned to racing was hugely good and amazing to watch. I personally think there was a lot of meat to Hunt's story as well, and he's clearly meant to be top billing/the main - there is his hasty marriage to Miller, its subsequent ugly dissolution, the way Hunt is doing this insanely risky sport to prove a point and that he starts falling apart when he doesn't have a team to race with. Despite plenty of time and plenty of not-literal racy segments (we see his butt in the first 10 mins I think), it just can't hold a candle to Brühl. Just a phenomenal performance.

Specific scenes I loved:
*Lauda meeting Marlene (his wife). After being admittedly an asshole to a fellow driver, who had invited him to a party out of pity, the door is closed in his face and he asks Marlene, who is leaving, for a lift to the nearest train station. While she's driving them, he tells her all the ways her car needs fixing, she replies it's fine and just got a service, scene cuts to them standing on the roadway next to her broken-down car. They are picked up by a couple guys who recognize Lauda and are massively excited to have him drive their car. Marlene doesn't believe he's a F1 driver because he drives like an old man, but when she asks, he does indeed drive like a fiend. Oh, I'm explaining this badly. But here's a clip.

To say this scene hit my thing for competence + hidden competence is putting it extremely mildly. This is the good stuff. I loved it so much.

*After Lauda returns to racing after his accident, his burn scars/graft are very visible as they're all over his head. At the press conference, he deal with all the questions pretty directly (IRL Lauda was apparently famously very blunt), and one reporter decides to dig and asks him how Lauda's wife feels and if his marriage will survive. Lauda tells him off and ends the press conference; and Hunt, who was also at the table, later corners the reporter and punches him in the face a few times, and tells the reporter to ask his wife if he likes his new appearance. That rivalry with the respect and a dash of protectiveness, that's also some damn good stuff. Then Hunt quietly closes the door on the reporter and doesn't mention it to anyone. It's definitely partly coming from the feelings of guilt - at the German Grand Prix, as they meet about whether or not to race in the dangerous conditions, Lauda tries to get the racers to call off the race - he's willing to risk death every race, but only to a certain degree, and this exceeds it massively. But Hunt opposes him, and sways the room by calling Lauda (and by extension anyone who agrees with him) a coward, not a good driver, etc.

Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) dir. Wolfgang Becker

Alex Kerner, a young man living in East Germany, sees his mother have a heart attack and go into a coma just as the Berlin Wall begins to fall. She is in a coma for eight months, and sleeps through a huge chunk of the reunification. When she awakes, the doctor warns Alex that any shock might cause another heart attack, potentially fatal. His mother was a very active member and supporter of the DDR, and Alex resolves to bring his mother home from the hospital and make sure she doesn't learn of the last eight months' changes - to create a world from her bedroom of a still-standing East Germany.

It's definitely a drama with some poignant, cute, funny moments, and it's the characters that again really carry the movie. First - Alex, dear god, I'm not sure he could be cuter. He tries his utmost to take care of his mother, and make sure that she doesn't know about the collapse of the communist regime, even though East Berlin is rapidly changing in every way. Since his mother is bedridden, it's theoretically possible. He retrieves the old furniture to transform the bedroom back to the way it was, tries to find the old foods (now no longer stocked - he resorts to buying jars of pickles that are being imported and dumping them into jars with old labels, or pouring coffee grounds into old foil packets), and with his friend Denis, films news segments that explain the inevitable slips that his mother sees, like gigantic banners of Coca-Cola being hung outside her window. For her birthday, he rounds up his some of his mother's old colleagues, some of whom are pretty depressed, as well as some young kids to perform as "Pioneers". He tries really, really hard. It's both extremely sweet and also sad/absurd, and the tension between the two, and the risk of a relapse hanging over the whole film, really give the film a good weight.

There is a great deal going on around this main narrative, too. His sister Ariane is more willing to move on, and thinks that they should tell their mother, though Alex convinces her to go along with the charade; she gets a job at Burger King, starts dating the manager there, starts dressing in western fashions and adjusting to the new life. And to be fair, Alex does, too; Alex starts dating the nurse who was helping his mother in the hospital, crosses the border to see what it's like on the other side, gets a new job setting up satellite dishes which can receive in other broadcasts, especially for national soccer. His girlfriend Lara feels uneasy about the whole thing and thinks that he should tell his mother the truth too.

One thing that I especially enjoyed about the movie is that despite the voiceover, which I thought was employed to great effect, and the narration being solidly Alex's point of view, the camera certainly filmed a more omniscient point of view. There's a lot that's just quietly shown and not said. Alex is so determined to protect his mother and make sure she doesn't come to harm - the scenes with him and his mother are done so well, and you can see how much he cares about her. But with the camera's ability to show what's going on, I think there's also a fair amount of underlying guilt that's driving Alex. Despite his mother's support for the communist regime, Alex is taking part in one of the demonstrations on the fateful night, and it's the sight of her son amongst the protestors that causes her to collapse. Not only that, but Alex sees her see him and then watches her crumple, and can't go and help her because he's being taken away forcibly by the police. Then the doctors tell him that CPR happened very late and that's why she's in a coma for so long and her prognosis is so bad. Alex never actually says anything about it, neither in the dialogue nor the narration, but the implication is pretty clear.

Then there is the plot about his father. The movie opens as Alex and Ariane are young kids. Their dad leaves, and both of them believe that he's left them for his West German girlfriend, and they never hear from him again; agents come to question his mother about his sympathies, connections, etc, and she explodes at them and then is taken ill for awhile. Much later in the movie she tells her children that it was a lie and that they originally planned in haste to leave, him first, she to follow, when a sudden opportunity came up, but that while he left, she was afraid that they would take both of her children away, and couldn't do it - and that she regrets the decision the most. She hid the letters that their father sent. Again there's the implication that her strong support for the regime was to counter the suspicion thrown on them by her husband leaving for West Germany, and to make sure that Alex and Ariane wouldn't be taken away from her, but it's never stated outright.

There are just so many good scenes. Personally, I actually cried a little at the scene when Alex, knowing his mother is dying, goes to find his father. He arrives at his father's house while a party is going on in the back. His father doesn't recognize him at first, sitting on the couch with his little step-siblings. The moment when Alex sees his father, a decade on, when his father realizes, there's very limited dialogue but the impact was so good and so painful. But truly, the whole film was so good, it's so hard to write this review because I just kind of want to go over the entire movie scene by scene and talk about what I liked about everything. I also really enjoyed the cinematography - some judicious sped up parts, many of the lovely shots like the one where Alex and Lara (his girlfriend) climb up the broken-up apartment building and sit with their legs hanging off the edge of the wall-less floor and look out over the city, the way the passage of time is depicted wordlessly sometimes (especially in the hospital at the end).

The movie closes with Alex reflecting that he doesn't regret doing it, that he is glad his mother never found out and was able to pass away without knowing the real way that the DDR fell (though he doesn't know about Lara trying to explain). During the last days of her illness, he concocts a story about how the wall falls, except in a way he calls a proper send off, instead of the ragged way it happened in real life; he realizes that his memories of the old regime are tinted with nostalgia and that they will forever be associated with his mother. It was a really poignant moment in a film full of really good emotional beats.

On a last note, this was also released in 2003, and I can't deal with how young Brühl looks. Genuinely occasionally so adorable I had to pause here and there to recover. I went trawling for some images/gifsets and sadly, because it came out a good decade before tumblr was a thing, there isn't a huge backlog of gifsets (wahh). However, I submit some photos for your consideration:

A gifset, for as long as it might last, since tumblr's links break so fast: https://fuckyeahbruhl-blog.tumblr.com/post/75479240528
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/197126.html.

unexpected autocorrect

2021-03-21T04:57:52Z

me: trying to make notes on my phone while in the field, about observed birds' plumage, beaks, behaviour, size, sometimes referencing mallards as they're a good reference point
google keyboard: autocorrects all the "ducks" to "fucks"

It was NOT fuck-shaped or -sized!
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/196764.html.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (TV)

2021-03-07T02:47:04Z

I'm watching a positive deluge of TV these days, compared to my usual baseline of zero - I started watching the BBC adaptation of Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club with another friend. It came out in the 1970s and stars Ian Carmichael as Wimsey.

They appear to be just available on youtube so the barrier to entry is very low.

I absolutely love Sayers, the Wimsey novels, and her writing generally - pretty much every aspect of the books. I actually think at this point, Gaudy Night might be my favourite novel, and it's really rare for books to get that high up in my estimation anymore (I only read it a few years ago). Of all her books though, I think I like Bellona Club least, though. I know other people don't really like Five Red Herrings but I love the setting, the fishing/painting duality the characters have going on, and I've always skipped over the timetables and mystery solving of mystery novels anyway, so it made no difference that Red Herrings had too many train timetable foolings. Plus there's the most enjoyable reconstruction that Wimsey and the Fiscal do at the end! Honestly, I think I dislike Bellona Club because I really hate George. I understand, I do: he feels humiliated and inadequate, because he got gassed in the war, clearly has PTSD/shellshock, and can't stick the things that the post-war world is requiring, living off his wife's earned income is humiliating, he sees the world has changed hugely and can't cope, etc. I get it. But he's so relentlessly unpleasant to Sheila, and he recognizes he's being a beast, and he just keeps on doing it. It makes Wimsey, visiting them, acutely uncomfortable too. There's also not much of the novel I can point at and like in terms of set-up or setting. Books like Murder May Advertise have the absolutely amazingly-drawn ad agency and its little politics as a backdrop, or the Nine Tailors has a wonderful sense of quietness and vastness, almost, to go with the huge bell tones of the book. Ugh I never reviewed the books back when I read them the first time but I loved them so much I tried to stretch them out and not read them all at once.

Anyway, the TV show is all right. Since I know the plot, most of my interest and enjoyment is derived from the strengths of adaptation; for visual media like TV mostly I am looking for good acting and visuals, if possible. Ian Carmichael is a good person, acting-wise, to play Wimsey, but he really doesn't look right. He's way too broad shouldered and conventionally handsome - Wimsey calls himself "funny lookin'" and is slight, which cause his opponents to underestimate him - both in intelligence and in fights, I might add. I also think Carmichael looks a little too old, but that's more subjective, probably. Wimsey's born in 1890, I have always felt Bellona Club takes place only a few years after the Great War, so he's somewhere in his late 20s or early 30s. George, by contrast, looks very young indeed, and honestly the visual depiction of George in this version is making him a lot more sympathetic - he's going off the handle but he is really painfully quite young for this. Murbles is pretty much EXACTLY the way I pictured him, it is amazing. I also quite like Pemberthy. He's a little soft-faced and very self-assured and confident, which rings quite right - just doesn't have the capital he needs.

I don't know if it's the poor quality on youtube or what but there's so little colour or resolution in the adaptation. Whew, everyone and everything grey, beige, black, or maybe grey again. It's cool to see all the 1920s decor. One of the joys of Wimsey is that he's filthy rich, it's not just the reader indulging in the fantasy of just having the money to do whatever he likes and be comfortable, Sayers actually talks about this herself, writing in the luxuries she couldn't afford - and despite the graininess of the footage I'm
enjoying looking at the set dressing. There's actual smoking with actual smoke, wow. The other really weird thing is it's shot with pretty much no sound effects or music soundtrack backing it at all. The only music is the beginning and ending title sequences. It is absolutely dead silent otherwise, and that feels so alien. I'm so used to modern cinema subtly or unsubtly cueing my emotions - and frankly sometimes it's mostly the violins coming down on a big sweep that's doing most of the emotional heavy lifting.
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/196556.html.

Daniel Sousa's FACE

2021-03-05T04:58:47Z

So I have apparently fallen fannishly for Agent Carter and subsequently have been rewatching (a lot). Maybe I'll recap the other episodes, since it provides nice structure. Anyway, a lot of the show watching for the first time was following the action, watching Peggy's face and her reactions, since the story is mostly told through and around her. On rewatches though I so enjoy watching all the other details, and right now, Daniel's reactions. I mean Gjokaj is ridiculously handsome anyway so it's also partly just watching his face, but he's also so incredibly expressive, so it's such a joy to watch the scenes again and see Daniel's reaction.

Please enjoy a gifset (I am sorry sholio I am stalking your tumblr for the pretty, pretty AC gifsets and meta) https://laylainalaska.tumblr.com/post/184705655939
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/196142.html.

1 month of birding every day

2021-03-01T00:26:05Z

Actually, 35 days of checklist streak, as defined by ebird. Because ebird is trying to collect data that is useful for science, they have birding protocols. The most valuable is a "complete checklist", where your primary purpose is birding, you try to identify all the birds that you can see and hear, and you give number counts - estimating obviously, if necessary (and it's very necessary when faced with thousands of birds at sea, I'm totally overwhelmed. Counting is hard!!)

Anyway, it's been pretty helpful, because if I've learned anything about practicing, it's that if you practice every day you cannot fail to get better. It's a very comforting thought. Piano was the first thing I did this with - my parents made me - but I've also done smaller projects like this, like carving a stamp a day for a set period of time. (THAT project levelled up my carving skills so fast, but I need to do a 30 days of drawing. Design is now the sticking point.) I definitely think I've gotten better at birding. It's forced me to not only go outside every day, which I'm actually pretty good at doing, but also makes me focus on listening and watching, being active about observing. Also, though I think I've got a pretty high tolerance for going to the same place and watching it change throughout the seasons, I do get bored, so I try to change up the locations. I usually go during lunch since I can't reliably get out of work in time before sunset; the main pond nearby has other birders reliably covering that location, but there are smaller parks and wooded patches that aren't well-visited at all, so since I'm local I try to keep a watch on those.

For lazy days, I have a feeder filled with seed that hangs on the lilac in the back yard. I call it a yard, but it's not really - it's about two meters of dirt that is at the back of the apartment block, with a concrete wall (overgrown with ivy) separating it from the alley, and a concrete path that runs through to the back door. However, there's also a reasonably tall lilac bush and I've hung the feeder from there. It gets mobbed by sparrows and I do so enjoy watching their little interpersonal conflicts and their cute little faces. Blue jays drop in too, and cardinals and mockingbirds. I'm sure the starlings will be back - I'm amazed they haven't come by yet.

Anyway, what I was going to talk about is the study that was done on avian populations in North America, and the staggering statistic that we've lost about 30% of the bird population compared to 1970. 1970 is only 50 years ago. These aren't rare birds disappearing - common backyard birds have suffered huge losses. Here is the article: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/nearly-30-birds-us-canada-have-vanished-1970

There's another article which I cannot find now but was talking about a physics lab (I think) in the Midwest, where to accommodate the lab, there's land set aside, and it's interestingly enough turned into a bit of a wildlife sanctuary, because it's land that's not being actively used for human purposes. The ecosystem's just been left alone. There's a scientist at that lab who also birds, and there was a quote from him saying that it was so strange (and disquieting) to walk through the property there and now hear so little birdsong, because he remembers. Older birders remember a past that had more birds in it. The change has come so fast.

It makes me wonder about my memory and the future. 2020 is when I started really observing and listening. This is my start. This is the baseline, for me - I've always liked nature but lived in cities, so Pandemic Year 2020 will probably be my earliest memories of birding. I'm a young person and life expectancy is pretty high, there are a lot of years to go. I hope I won't ever have similar thoughts, and to be saddened by the silence of the woods & meadows. I think about how common mallards and Canadian geese are and how any patch of water might have a duck or two in it, no matter how small; I think about how even when running errands, passing by some ordinary city house's shrubbery I can hear a vocal horde of house sparrows chattering away; I think about the way I can stand still in a small urban forest and hear black-capped chickadees singing their distinctive song. I hope these don't become rare experiences.
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/196061.html.

Rather late rambling about Endgame

2021-02-28T06:41:32Z

I was mad about the way Endgame ended in a lot of ways, but I watched it when it came out and wasn't really doing much lj/dw, so I didn't write about it. But watching Agent Carter really made me think about how much I dislike a lot of how that movie handled things.

Leaving aside the whole issue of how it feels like so many female characters got screwed over, specifically (Natasha? Gamora? etc) and how much the manpain of Thanos irritated me*, the time travel was just terrible. Superficially, it was enjoyable to watch previous scenes like the Avengers (2012) scenes from a different angle and to see different outcomes. But I hate time travel in fiction generally because it messes up the storytelling a lot, especially in canons where the story mostly isn't about time travel, which frankly the MCU wasn't going for. Up until this very last moment, the storytelling was very linear.

1. There's a lot of speculation and contradictory information, because of canon vs word of god, plus somewhat unexplained canon, about how the time travel works. What really is sticking in my craw of course is Steve going back in time and living out his life with Peggy. When old Steve shows up on the park bench, the movie is implying that Steve got there by living through the years, and he knows to show up at that spot because he obviously time-travelled from there first, so he knows that if he shows up in year 202X at this park he'll find Bucky and Sam there. Which means it's the same universe. Which means - I don't even know. There's another Steve who is frozen in the ice until the 21st century, Peggy and Steve hide their relationship somehow?, Steve hides from the public too, Bucky's going through the Winter Soldier programming and being used as an assassin and Steve knows about it but isn't doing anything, Steve knows SHIELD is HYDRA and isn't telling Peggy or they're both complicit, just so many unanswerable, character-changing implications are being created by this time travel. Being from the future means you know things. And you want to not act on them? Not only is this refusing to engage with the time-travel question - Marvel, you open this can of worms, you need to address them - but it's also not really in line at all with Steve's personality.

2. That Steve/Sharon kiss is so weird with this implication. I don't think it's stated how Peggy and Sharon are related but - have they never met? Is he not her great-uncle?

3. Another problem with time travel and narrative is that it sucks all the urgency and timeliness out of your story. If you can go back - even if you have only one chance - to any time, then it's no longer urgent. You can get good and ready before you go back. It's all past, anyway. You could limit it like Endgame does with limited trips back into the past, but a lot of the urgent tension of fixing things just dissipates.

4. The way Steve went back and got together with Peggy just doesn't sit right with me after watching Agent Carter. I know, the team movies are tough to do because they have to integrate ALL the solo movies/shows, and historically that's not always been a priority (cf Ragnorak Thor's character journey being regressed, etc) since the priority is probably creating an enjoyable movie that fits in under 2 hours. I also know that being in fandom means I'm much more invested and probably remember more about previous movies than casual moviegoers, who make up the majority of the movie-watching population. But damn it, I hate it. So much of AC was Peggy accepting her grief, moving on, forging a path forward. The time-travel just totally stomps that theme and message.

The weird thing is I distinctly remember shipping Steve/Peggy, not blindingly hard or anything, but quite generally happy with them together and/or exploring their relationship. That was less than 10 years ago. I now cannot summon any of that feeling at all. Maybe I should rewatch CA:TFA. I think what is causing this is that they were just embarking on the relationship and then he goes into the ice and then it's another loss in the war for Peggy, who is understandably carrying around a ton of grief already.

*The main issue is he keeps being so SAD about how oh boohoo, his life is so difficult, he has to sacrifice his "daughter" Gamora and everything. Well, you are the architect of everyone's problems, including your own. I have sympathy for those who are screwed over by no or little fault of their own, I enjoy villains who are just out there cackling away and doing what they want, but kindly spare me the crying about things which you caused yourself! You brought this on yourself and moreover, you could stop this right now if you wanted. No one made you kill half the population, and your plan was unutterably stupid in the first place - if it's all life, are you aware that the way life happens on earth requires a lot of eating of other organisms, once we're past the photosynthetic layer?! This doesn't solve an overpopulation problem if you halve the resources! That's not how math or ecology works!
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/195669.html.

Agent Carter S2E10 (Hollywood Ending)

2021-02-27T05:00:10Z

Last Agent Carter episode :( I'm still emotionally recovering. I'm sort of coping by reading fic. AHHHH!!! (I'm not coping.)

*FIRST THINGS FIRST, JACK IS NOT DEAD. I'll come back to this.

*It's a good thing Jason detonated when he did because that was a confrontation heading nowhere good extremely fast. I...I really do think that Peggy might have shot Jack, and that Jack had really made his mind up that he was going to detonate the gamma cannon. Jack had a lot emotionally riding on it, I think - he had decided he needed to make the hard decision about it, and then had done so.

*Is Vernon dead or not? Sounds like they left it open. Well, at least Peggy got a few good punches in on him last episode, that's the only justice we're getting.

*Why not actually drive over Whitney again? It will slow her down a bit!

*I felt so bad for the dude who Manfredi brings in to let Whitney torture, and the show did a great job of making me believe he was genuinely innocent. And then he screams out that he cooperated with the feds and Manfredi's dismayed "oh no now I have to kill you" was kind of adorable (??) I so enjoyed watching Manfredi's expression change from bafflement to dismay to anger.

*Aw, Daniel including one photograph of Peggy is so cute. (I hope they're shooting with high ISO film, it looks dark in there!)

*LOL at Daniel mostly falling out of the window.

*Manfredi genuinely cares about Whitney Frost and I kind of ship them. Not only is he seeing her clearly - he recognizes her intelligence and her mile-wide ruthless streak and hunger for power - but he loves that. I don't know that Chadwick ever did, honestly. Whitney didn't want Chadwick to see that, and he only saw because Zero Matter happened, and when he realized he tried to have the Council dispose of her. He obviously knew she was okay with blood on her hands, she's sitting in the car as they pay off the man for shooting the crooked cop, but she also has to get him to do what she wants by appealing to his protective side.

Relatedly, I want to know who approached who. Did Chadwick "discover" Whitney somewhere? Was Whitney employed at Isodyne and wanted to run things or have freer rein? Chadwick fronted and/or managed Isodyne, and Whitney was the brains, but how did they get to this? In an earlier episode, Chadwick, convincing Whitney to present to the Council, seems to have Whitney's trust (and then there's the scene in the boardroom, where she flat out says, "I trusted you!")

OK Manfredi is constantly on a knife edge and has like no impulse control but look, he's genuinely sweet sometimes! And he even can cook!

*Intrigued also by Manfredi and Stark knowing each other. I guess they probably crossed paths in New York. Howard does say in the first season that he grew up poor. Jason's reaction to the whole thing was perfect though. His face, the way he was like "this man KIDNAPPED ME".

*I enjoyed the three scientists bickering. It was fun! Both Wilkes and Samberly eyerolling at Stark, it's so fun. I do love Howard - but he's rightly mildly ridiculous.

*Samberly you never had a chance, catch a clue!

*Daw, Jack coming in first to say "I'm not a scientist but I'm here to help" and also him taking the lunch order. I love it.

*Is the redacted file that Jack takes from Vernon's folder the same one he dug up from England?

*I like that Jason was like wait, wait, safety meeting! This isn't exactly a show heavy on the boring engineering/safety/building etc part, but I did enjoy that Jason was like wait, we should probably talk about some logistics. Of course, it's to put parameters around the climactic scene, but still.

*Jack and Peggy's convo!! I feel myself going kind of hearts eyes over it for some reason. Look, OK, after the whole Belarus incident, they may scrap a bit, but genuinely, they work GREAT together. On cases, they work so well as a team - they bounce ideas off each other and compare notes, they're united in their goals and work together to achieve them. So I also enjoyed the somewhat emotion-baring parts here. The way Jack wonders if Peggy will come after him - Jack, how have you worked so long with Peggy and still not realized this?? Buddy, think about it a minute! Peggy isn't here to ruthlessly clean house, she never was. She does make hard decisions but it's not out of inflexibility. Also laughed when Jack actually brought up whether Peggy would shoot him then changed the subject.

*DAMN IT we don't get an answer to the Arena Club pin key thing!!

*For some reason Whitney walking to the rift gives off very strong Dorothy in Oz vibes. I think it's heightened by the unreality of the movie set.

*The VFX in the rift reabsorbing zero matter was very weird. It's so...shoestring budget, lol. Why?

*In general the climax at the end was kind of eh. For one, why can't they use a tool? They could cobble something together. Or why not tie Daniel to something more sturdy? The human chain isn't a good idea! Let's solve this problem! Anyway, skip.

*I'm so glad that Ana and Peggy got to hug.

*Jarvis is so hurt when Peggy says she called a taxi. Then he just flies off the step in a leap when she says OK.

*"Have you tried a 'taco'?" Daw! I also just love Jarvis and Peggy's friendship. It's such a good strong emotional tie all throughout this show.

*DANIEL being all "you were reckless" when he rushed in to the danger zone! Oi!

*Peggy and Daniel together are very cute.

*The shooting hurts me :( he was JUST on the phone with Daniel all cheerily.

*This show is not that heavy on the realism part, all told - look, Peggy gets rebar through her abdomen and yes she is obviously in pain for an episode but then it kind of goes away and isn't mentioned again. I think he can recover.

*I guess the shooter is potentially Michael? Since the file could (maybe is) Michael Carter's file.

*Not only do I covet many, many of Peggy's outfits, I also quite like Jack's long grey coat from S1.

*I feel like this season was a lot more slapstick than the first. I read someone writing that they felt Peggy's grief for Steve really anchored/gave emotional weight to the first season, and I have to agree about that. I think it balanced well against the more fantasy elements of the show. However, I like that the first season concluded that arc, though; one of the overall themes that I enjoyed about the show was Peggy's ultimate determination to carry on, to move forward, to do what she could and not wallow in either the past or to nurse grievances, but always to engage with the world as it was and move forward. I really enjoyed season 2, but I think the combination of the greater emotional weight + the NYC setting make it my favourite. Though, I'll be rewatching S2 and maybe eventually my opinion will change!
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/195474.html.

Agent Carter S2E9 (A Little Song and Dance)

2021-02-18T23:59:01Z

30 mins till last ep, typing as fast as possible. I'm scared for the last episode. How will they resolve everything? (They will not, dang it).

*I'm with Michael - I understand why Peggy is a little angry with Michael, but she really doesn't seem like someone who wanted to stand aside.

*I admit I totally laughed throughout the dance sequence - it's so elaborate and inexplicable - but I also enjoyed it a lot. Yay I'm so glad to see Angie around again! I think I remember Peggy's dress of that shape to be purple, nice to see it's a slight twist. Peggy's unconscious dream version of Daniel is him in a sweatervest! hahahahaha I love it. I was distracted trying to see if I could recognize anyone in the backing troupe but I don't think there's anyone in there. Pity - thought I might recognize Ana in there or something.

*I quite enjoy the deconstructed set, like the L&L Automat sign (the green honestly makes me think of that creepy hotel that that Leviathan operative was typing from though) and and random revolving doors and then stage.

*Argument between Peggy and Jarvis painful but necessary, I think (and at least they did it fast). I really enjoy their relationship and how Peggy has support from Jarvis; this hurt to watch. But I'm on Peggy's side here. The urge for vengeance is one thing but what about the result of your actions? Do they actually benefit you or do they just temporarily assauge some mental pain that you could solve in other ways (i.e. why are you not by Ana's side helping her?!) Blah, I hate male plotlines like this where they're always hell-bent on revenge no matter the consequences or the thoughts of any of the people they're supposedly concerned about.

*The BLUFFING, I enjoyed that very much. Of Daniel, Jack and Samberly, I would pick Jack to play the bluff every single time, lol - neither of the other two are anywhere close. Very tense with the corrupt SSR agents - definitely things teetered on the knife edge for a second there. I also felt so much anxiety with Masters & the other three - can't believe Masters didn't see through it? I guess Masters felt he had effectively erased the wall-safe incident from Jack's mind and that Jack wasn't against him.

*PEGGY STORMING IN AND THEN BEATING UP VERNON. I enjoy that no one tried to stop her and/or could react in time...and that Daniel & Jack heard the confrontation and immediately ran over and were like Peggy no! (And the fact she was doing it because she thought he had locked them up somewhere/killed them). That's pretty tasty.

*What on earth does Vernon have on Peggy? Just influence that he could use to destroy her credibility the way anyone in the 1940s could?

*It's so hard to tell sometimes with Jack but the play with Frost (I want a seat on the council) is one that would make sense to her - she wants power and doesn't see another way to get it.

*Jason's "You're very stubborn, aren't you" - I think this is the conclusion of many people about Peggy :D

*I also really enjoyed Jack turning Vernon over to Frost. He deserves it. He got to hear that his protege is willing to leave him to die at Whitney Frost's hands... And again, Jack tries to do the right thing (though he's left Jason behind to die, admittedly) and is foiled again. I love that his immediate reaction is first that the transmitter is broken, then that Peggy has interfered, and then he runs off to find out what she's done.

*That last confrontation. OMG. Watching Peggy pull the gun on Jack is just terrifying, because she would.

OH GOD AND THEN IT ENDS THERE
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/194907.html.

Agent Carter S2E8 (The Edge of Mystery)

2021-02-18T05:24:10Z

I got behind and we are watching the last episode (sadness) of Agent Carter tomorrow.

*"Don't make promises you can't keep." ;__;

*Jarvis looks wrecked but Ana looks just like she's peacefully napping. Watching that whole sequence was so painful. Jarvis is so obviously in pain.

*Daniel is wearing a pressed shirt. No more loud Hawaiian shirts, aw.

*OK I do enjoy Manfredi. He's so volatile and ridiculous, and then there's a shot of him happily making pasta, then his mood changes so quickly. Nonna is a bit much but he's both terrifying and kind of adorable, maybe it's the occasional sincerity. The line about finding Whitney more beautiful because it's a mark of power, yikes but also aw.

*I also enjoy the trope where the action and fighting is just in the background while something immaterial happens (GOTG2's opening sequence comes to mind with baby Groot dancing)

*Nooooo Jason!!! She's clearly insane, stop listening to Whitney! Anyone who is like "but we should listen to the mystery voices in our heads", you gotta stop listening!

*Hate the obsession with babies in the MCU generally, skip. Jarvis needs to tell Ana. The doctor should have told Ana first. But 1940s, man.

*Aloysius Herbert Samberly. Whew.

*Jarvis I think it would be better for Ana if you STAYED WITH HER. Aaargh there's no arguing with writing like this.

*Aw, Samberly's excited to get blueprints/designs for a Howard Stark machine!

*That Peggy-Jack conversation about the file is so great. "Chief Thompson, you don't need to cut corners to get ahead"/"I wouldn't [betray your trust]". Definitely Jack so blinded by the fear of his secret he doesn't understand/think through that Peggy really wouldn't use it.

*Not the first time Peggy's been in a situation like that - in the Iron Curtain episode, she tries to negotiate too, asking the scientist in Belarus to also drop his weapon so they can discuss it first, trying to find a way out that doesn't involve killing.

*Holy crap the way Peggy says, "You'll have to kill me, Jason." Just the way it's delivered - Peggy can bluff but also she is willing to take the consequences. Holy crap. No wonder Jason immediately swung around and applied pressure to Daniel. I also

*The scumminess of Vernon and the way he says things are true and what's on the public record are two different things and the record is what matters, ugh, and it hits harder given the past 4 years. Such garbage.

*Jack turning on Masters yesss finally

*But ahhh he's trying to do the right thing and no one in this show can get stuff to go right, dang it. The SSR probably should secure its lab things a little more securely - this was an issue in the New York office too! Suborning Dooley or no, they really just had to waltz in once they had the authority. Not even keys to lock dangerous stuff up.

*Genuinely thought Jack was pretending to be confused at first (another bluff)? I also enjoy Peggy's incredibly clear questioning. She's always been decisive and clear, it's one of the many things I just love about Peggy. Cuts right to the important things.

*Some fun OT3 things in this episode omfg. The little discussion in the office, Jack popping back in to say he'd let Jason shoot both of them. Aw man, I love when they finally get to work on the same side.

*Daniel being all "you have to be dispassionate"...yeah, Daniel, you're the wrong person to say this. You just broke on that!

*Samberly you are so not getting anywhere with Rose, just give it up.

*To be fair all the demands made of Samberly are pretty ridiculous. He doesn't have the ability to test anything and it's not his fault!

*DO AS PEGGY SAYS <- I love this moment SO much. Both of them scream it, it's so great.

*Whitney screaming about it supposed to be her is disturbing.

*Jarvis is just...no. THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA.

*If it's gamma waves it's electromagnetic radiation, it doesn't have mass the way that matter does, you don't need to adjust for wind?? Ah well.

*Finally someone on the show shoots and it turns out it's ineffective. Ah, well.

Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/194815.html.

On Looking - Alexandra Horowitz (3/?)

2021-02-14T04:51:12Z

On Looking is an exploration of what the world looks like through different experts' eyes - the ability of one's perceptions and interests, training and background, shape how we see the same scene. Written by Alexandra Horowitz, an expert in dog cognition, she explores (mostly) the same block of NYC through many different people's eyes.

I picked up the book because I am also personally fascinated by how we perceive the world around us, and especially I am fascinated by the idea of the secret things lying in plain sight. It's not a question of the perception of our rods and cones and how wide you are physically keeping your eyelids - there's just too much visual (and other) information to appropriately or reasonably process it all, and we pick and choose, often completely unconsciously, what to actually perceive. It's a question of focus and conscious/unconscious attenuation to different things, and Horowitz shares this interest, and takes a walk with many different people - first, by herself; then with her young toddler, with a typographer, with a doctor, with an entomologist, a sound designer, with someone who went blind in middle age, with her dog, etc.

I pretty much found them all really interesting. Horowitz devotes a chapter to each person and writes engagingly, wrapping transcribed dialogue with her perception as it changed, description, and context, which is always valuable. I really enjoyed several chapters - the one that talked about how we walk on crowded sidewalks, the city animals that live among humans, with an illustrator (and an interesting diversion into meeting the gazes of strangers - one of the first things you learn to NOT do in a city). The most engagingly written, though, was the one with Horowitz's dog, which I guess is unsurprising. The conceit is always engaging for me to read (I like dogs!), they've become integrated with humans for thousands of years and dogs can do things like actually follow our gazes, and that's Horowitz's specialty. Maybe also because the other chapters are from other human's perception - with the exception of the woman who went blind, we're all really visual based, but dogs aren't. It

My main objection to the book is just the constant evocation of various savannah hypotheses - the one where we attempt to explain why our ability to concentrate or some other psychological phenomenon comes directly from avoiding lions trying to eat us for dinner. It's not that I have any specific objection, I think, yet - just that I've watched so many eg evo-psych theorists propound hypotheses that they have not tested, and nor do they ever think they might be fallible and steeped in their individual culture. Why, for example, do all the gender norms you propose originated from paleolithic living end up perfectly fitting into 1950's American middle-class roles? A lot of those questions about how our concentration work are still inadequately answered, as far as I know. I don't think Horowitz is necessarily going too far, I'm not qualified to judge that. But it's distracting and always kicks me out. There is also one walk with a doctor who specializes in diagnosing issues visually - contrasting with doctors who make an estimate based on symptoms, examination, and then order tests. I don't mean to downplay this skill but I think there are definitely a lot which cannot be easily visually identified, a lot of misdiagnosis that has happened in the past before we developed sensitive tests, and also, on these walks, it's hard to check the answer. So-and-so says they have this, and you can't just run up to that perfect stranger and ask (or have it found out). You just have to rely on reputation, and your perception rests on their authoritativeness and substitutes for truthful or accurate diagnoses. Maybe this is also driven by the knowledge that so many people go through so much effort to get their complex medical issue diagnosed properly. The doctor is compared explicitly to Sherlock Holmes and I can't say I like that much either. There were so many where I just wanted to then go and fact-check.

8/10
Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/194389.html.

running late on so many entries - Taylor Swift's re-recording of Love Story

2021-02-14T03:56:09Z

But I just listened to Taylor Swift's re-release of Love Story. Her master recordings are owned by Scooter Braun and she's tried unsuccessfully to buy them back, so she's re-recording them.

I have listened to the original Love Story hundreds of times at this point and know it really well, so it was really interesting to go and listen to the new release. Once I listen enough to a recording, it's never quite the same as the first. All the roughness and unusual parts become known and expected, what's seen as initially weird patches are just part of the song then. The re-recording is itself "new" and I'm noticing detail that I won't once I get accustomed to it.

The recording (Taylor's Version), is definitely a lot more controlled, vocally speaking. I've criticized Swift before for her uneven singing, especially early on live, where there's a lack of breath support, vowels get slid around and sometimes the vowel distorts as the note goes on longer (big no-no in classical singing), a thinness to the sound when there are jumps etc. I stopped listening to her live performances around 2010 because I preferred to just enjoy the recordings. On the recordings, a lot of the live singing's weaknesses are just not that big of a deal. There's a freshness and a youth to the voice itself (plus the technique) on the original which helps sell the track, a track which is a really good song but is still written by a really young Taylor. Oh man, I used to listen to this on the radio while lying in bed! This might have preceded Vevo. This was the first Swift song I heard that made me a fan, more than a decade ago. But listening to the re-recording, it's pretty easy to hear the difference - Taylor's gotten a ton more controlled and deft with her voice - there's an "oh, oh" in the second verse that is quite different. Lots more deliberate note ends especially so that they are rhythmic, losing/dropping the twang, when her voice catches it feels much more practiced. On the new recording, it sounds like her vocals are overriding the instrumentation and leading on the song, whereas the original feels a little more like it's going along. The pleading part where she sings to Romeo and voices her doubts is a lot less plaintive, and it loses a little in the contrast when Romeo replies (even the bounce back into major key isn't enough to make up the difference). Even if she had stagnated in her singing, which she clearly hasn't, a thirty year old's voice just sounds different from a nineteen year old. It's obvious just listening.

I don't really have a point to this. I think it's awesome she's re-recording, and even if there wasn't a dispute with her masters (and I'm on her side, too) - I'm still of the "two cakes" disposition, and I'm pleased to have two copies of a song I love to listen to, and compare. I'm looking forward to the re-recordings and mixing and matching the ones I like the best.

Love Story (from Fearless, 2008)

Love Story (Taylor's Version) (from Fearless (Taylor's Version), 2021)

Crosspost: https://silverflight8.dreamwidth.org/194301.html.