Open Threads are for chatting, asking 101 questions, and self-promotion links to personal blogs and interesting material. Please be polite.
35
comments:
duckbunny
said...
So I do this thing called Advent Knowledge, which is a thing where some people post interesting and informative things every day during Advent, and some other people (including the first people) read it and become informed and it's all lots of fun. And this year we have a website, which is very exciting, because we haven't had a central place to collate things before, and that means we can throw submissions open to anyone who wants to come and play. So come and play! Because everybody knows something and learning is cool.
See Skyfall, that's the one that got pretty much all of that stuff right.
Sometimes it's almost distracting how much they're trying to go "this James Bond film is an honest-to-Glob James Bond film", but then something really cool happens to bring you back in.
And of the non-M characters, one of them is actually really good, and my objection comes mostly in the form that I think she's just not given a name until the very end (and even that is kind of okay considering the gag they make out of it at the very end).
But the other character...
It countermands a fair bit of the good, in my eyes.
Edited a short story that I'm planning to submit to tor before the long weekend is over. It's about a violinist who learns that she's from another world, where music has magical power, and she needs to go back to that world to save it. After another edit today, I hope to get it sent in.
Preparing for a trip to Asia to present some of my research at a conference. I'll be doing a tour of several major cities in japan and Korea, and this is the first time I've done my own scheduling for a cross-ocean trip, so working out the logistics is ... a new experience. But I did get my Japan Rail Pass today, so that's one worry taken care of.
Came up with an idea for a YA fantasy novel, which I want to mull over and see if it's worth turning into an actual work.
A Song of Ice and Fire or Game of Thrones is a narrative where I don't really feel incentivized to like the characters so much as be entertained by their actions.
By which I mean... I -enjoy- reading the characters, because they generally act in interesting and entertaining ways, while being largely unconcerned with whether or not they're particularly decent people.
If only in my experience of reading the books; it would matter more in discussions of related issues, but that's a different stack of suger cubes, I think.
For my own part thus, I don't find it difficult to know whether or not I'm enjoying the characters, so there's that.
Happy Thanksgiving yesterday! I ate tooooooo much pie. It did not help that the Grommit kept taking bites out of pie that I then felt obligated to finish.
My Nano floundered badly and will not be a winner this year. That's ok though, I decided to go back and put the finishing touches on last year as an exercise and that's been rewarding in its own way.
So I watched the first part of the Breaking Dawn film adaptation--the first piece of anything Twilight-related I've completed--and paradoxically, it managed to feel both boring and engrossing. Bella, absent the additional context provided by the rest of her story, managed to come off as rather sympathetic throughout, which cannot be said for Edward, Jacob, Charlie, or the plurality of male characters, really. I also really liked Alice, and would have liked to have seen more of Jessica, because Anna Kendrick is awesome.
I also watched A Separation, the Iranian film about the couple whose separation serves as the backdrop for a truly spectacular legal and moral fustercluck. It is amazing, complex, and a fascinating showcase of what happens when parties who have both been wronged (to steal a phrase from Melissa McEwan) worry more about being right than about doing the right thing. Possibly the best film I've seen all year. (Content Note: A significant part of the film deals with a miscarriage [ETA: and Alzheimer's]).
ETA: Also, I've begun a deconstruction series for Mark Crilley's Miki Falls, a graphic novel whose plot parallels Twilight's, and is still to a degree very problematic, but has the benefit of a stronger creator at the helm. It only has two entries for now, but give it a look-see, if you'd like.
I'm posting from a tablet and apparently Disqus won't let me log on with OpenID.
I'm visiting my mom who is definitely inclined to policing my diet. I have to monitor my carb intake due to diabetes, but she is not helping with her "ZOMG DEATHFATS!"
We're actually having the feast tomorrow to accommodate my sister who is in fire/rescue and prone to volunteering to work on major holidays.
Hello, Ramblites. It's about food time here on Harvest festival day. Been watching the padded rugby squads today, mostly, although it took several hours to get through one game...and then they lost.
Mostly, though, it's the beginning of the session where I start wishing people to have a better year than the last.
I had a lovely Thanksgiving and I hope everyone else who was celebrating did too.
My happy introvert day involved staying home and not talking to anyone, aside from my father who lives here, ;-p. He went to my sister's and tried to nag me into going as well.
Lemme tell you about a conversation my father told me about hearing today at my sister's. He mentioned how in ye olden days they added livermush to the dressing, which my sister dutifully added. Her husband piped in with, 'SiL won't eat it--he hates livermush'. Daughter (ie wife of SiL) says: 'What he doesn't know won't hurt him.' And much merriment was had. And SiL ate livermush, either none the wiser or wise enough not to diss his MiL's cooking.
As someone who would spend the night vomiting after eating some of my no-go (for, I will admit, purely psychological reasons) foods... yeah. I'll pass on the festivities, which also include food policing, if past experience is any indication. I'll eat my 'birdlike' meal or my 'surprisingly large' meal or whatever it shakes out to be in peace. Well, in as much peace as possible with a cat who loves turkey underfoot.
And tomorrow I will go to my other sister's, bearing pies and ham and possibly turkey if I can sneak it out of the house.
The characters in AGoT are very strongly three-dimensional creatures. You think you know them and they'll turn some new angle of themselves into the light. Just goes to show what you can do when you put your mind into creating a world. Not that it's a nice world.
I've blogged about clothes and shoes of historical persuation. Mostly in Finnish though, although I do try to include an English condenced version in the bottom of the post.
And now I need to take the dog out before going to bed. Good night, or day, all.
Happy Thanksgiving to those in the US, and to Japan as well, which is happening at kinda sorta the same time. My niece and nephew are goofy, and their interaction reminds me a lot of being the oldest child growing up and how younger siblings, no matter how much you love them, can really seem to be a pain. >_< Especially when you're a little kid.
And I'm a bit worried, as my cat has worms. We've given her roundworm meds as well as updating her flea and tick meds, but I've got this terrible paranoia of parasites. Ugh.
Well inspired by you, Ana, as well as awesome folks like Fred Clark and Something Short and Snappy I've started doing my own "Read Along" series. I'm reading Pride & Prejudice and writing commentary but because the book is out of copyright I'm including the whole text of the book so anyone can read along and not miss anything. Anyway if you think that's cool, you could check it out on my blog. Hopefully my name will link to my blog, I don't really know how this works.
Happy Thanksgiving to you folk in the USA who celebrate such things, Happy Thursday to a bunch of the rest of you and Happy Friday to the rest of us. (As I'm only in Australia, Will Wildman is still further into the future than me, but I must say that Friday looks great from here so far)
Is anyone else having a hard time deciding if you like the characters or not? I keep flopping back and forth on these people. I think that the only character that I like and have liked consistently is Jon, and maybe Arya(I withhold judgement on Arya until she develops a bit more) and even then I don't always enjoy being around Jon. I have trouble disliking characters consistenly too. Characters I don't like suddenly do something that I enjoy. I'm only in the first book so far so there's a lot left to get through, so maybe I'll make up my mind eventually.
Oh, this isn't a complaint. I love reading complex characters and I love being suprised by their actions or thoughts. I just find it really unusual that a book with so many characters is managing this when most books can't even keep a single character ambiguous for me.
If you're still on A Game of Thrones, there are various bits of character development and new information to learn about them, so flip-flopping may well occur all the way up to A Storm of Swords at least. As for actually liking anyone... most characters have aspects of themselves that are likeable, I guess? (Some more than others.) There are a few characters in A Feast for Crows who seem like genuinely decent people.
I'm spending my morning pretending to Nano, trying to catch up. Of course, I say pretending, because the brand new video game that Husband just bought, and is now playing, is fascinating, and I'd much rather watch him play than write.
I figure, if I tell enough people that I am writing with the intent to catch up for Nano, maybe eventually it will magically be true.
The URL for advent knowledge is missing something - it tries to go to somewhere on Ana's site. If you don't mind, let's try again - Advent Knowledge: How Does This Work? Hopefully, this goes to the right place.
@Mime_Paradox -
Looks like a good content policy. One thing: "Derp and variations are..." has no consequence, although I assume it's going to be bad, possibly bannably so.
So I drafted a comment policy for my secret blog, and given that I have little to no confidence in my judgement when it comes determing what constitutes a problematic statement, I'd really appreciate some feedback on it, from those with the spoons to give it a read.
Re: Skyfall: Without spoiling anything, I feel that the film's ending will give hope to those that don't like the Craig Bond that future films will be more to their liking, as it very much brings things full circle. Unfortunately, when I mean "full circle", I mean all the way back to Dr. No and From Russia With Love (which, by the way, is an excellent film, problematic aspects aside), with all that entails.
With what is almost definitely the WORST treatment of its women characters (apart from M) of any of them.
Considering this is a Bond movie, that's really saying something!
(Generally speaking, I like Bond movies despite all that's wrong with them. At least when they're being over-the-top wish fulfillment fantasies - which is why I have avoided the Daniel Craig Bond movies. Apparently, rebooting them grim'n'gritty has worked for most people, but it's not what I go for. Though, considering that the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies are my favorites (and not just because he's hot, or because they made some attempt to do well with their women characters - if with mixed results - though both of those things help), it's entirely possible that I have no taste.)
Depends on how you're defining "like" - one of my very favorite characters in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 is Gul Dukat, who spends much of the show being a villain and is demonstrably racist against Bajorans. I'd never want to spend time around someone like him in real life, but as a fictional character he's tremendously entertaining to me, and so I'm always delighted to see him show up.
Likewise. (Well, I wasn't overly exited when the Pah-Wraiths got involved, but that was hardly the worst plot I can think of on that show.)
I was also tremendously fond of Garak, Quark, Odo, Kira, and Damar. I thought DS9 did a pretty good job of showing characters whose moral standards are not really the audiences or the Starfleet characters, but still demonstrably have moral standards. (I was particularly fond with the way the show dealt with changing morality - what was acceptable for Bajorans a thousand years ago isn't any more. Garak and Kira's standards of acceptable behavior haven't really changed much - but who they apply to has changed. Odo has a hard time figuring out the difference between Order and Justice. And so on.)
Something weird going on with your comment, in the email notification I got the whole thing was there, but looking at it here I can only see what you quoted, not what you said regarding the thing you quoted.
Hello various Ramblites! I am speaking to you from the future. At least, it's probably your future, because I am in New Zealand and there aren't a lot of places closer to the International Date Line (I'm 17 hours ahead of my usual time zone, which was a bit of a dizzying change). It is gorgeous and there are volcanoes everywhere and I will be visiting various Lord of the Rings filming sites in the coming weeks, so life is pretty much amazing. Sadly, my internet access is limited (I have enough time every day to check my email, update my NaNo wordcount, and maybe a few news sites) so I will not be posting much for the immediate future, but I will drop by to see what's up if I can. Yay for everything and everyone elsewise.
(I have been managing to keep up with NaNo so far, but this final week may prove a challenge. Things are getting hectic. The heroes have travelled back in time and successfully prevented a murder and are about to discover that was a terrible idea. Yet again, I will not be nearly finished at 50K, but that's okay, my goal is simply to finish the book no matter how long it takes.)
35 comments:
So I do this thing called Advent Knowledge, which is a thing where some people post interesting and informative things every day during Advent, and some other people (including the first people) read it and become informed and it's all lots of fun.
And this year we have a website, which is very exciting, because we haven't had a central place to collate things before, and that means we can throw submissions open to anyone who wants to come and play. So come and play! Because everybody knows something and learning is cool.
See Skyfall, that's the one that got pretty much all of that stuff right.
Sometimes it's almost distracting how much they're trying to go "this James Bond film is an honest-to-Glob James Bond film", but then something really cool happens to bring you back in.
And of the non-M characters, one of them is actually really good, and my objection comes mostly in the form that I think she's just not given a name until the very end (and even that is kind of okay considering the gag they make out of it at the very end).
But the other character...
It countermands a fair bit of the good, in my eyes.
If I do see any, it would be that one. Or any future ones that remember they're supposed to be over-the-top wish fulfillment fantasies.
Though you're making me think I'll be wanting to throw stuff at my TV over parts of it.
The Pierce Brosnan movies had the best M. And the Craig ones as well, so far.
Edited a short story that I'm planning to submit to tor before the long weekend is over. It's about a violinist who learns that she's from another world, where music has magical power, and she needs to go back to that world to save it. After another edit today, I hope to get it sent in.
Preparing for a trip to Asia to present some of my research at a conference. I'll be doing a tour of several major cities in japan and Korea, and this is the first time I've done my own scheduling for a cross-ocean trip, so working out the logistics is ... a new experience. But I did get my Japan Rail Pass today, so that's one worry taken care of.
Came up with an idea for a YA fantasy novel, which I want to mull over and see if it's worth turning into an actual work.
A Song of Ice and Fire or Game of Thrones is a narrative where I don't really feel incentivized to like the characters so much as be entertained by their actions.
By which I mean... I -enjoy- reading the characters, because they generally act in interesting and entertaining ways, while being largely unconcerned with whether or not they're particularly decent people.
If only in my experience of reading the books; it would matter more in discussions of related issues, but that's a different stack of suger cubes, I think.
For my own part thus, I don't find it difficult to know whether or not I'm enjoying the characters, so there's that.
Happy Thanksgiving yesterday! I ate tooooooo much pie. It did not help that the Grommit kept taking bites out of pie that I then felt obligated to finish.
My Nano floundered badly and will not be a winner this year. That's ok though, I decided to go back and put the finishing touches on last year as an exercise and that's been rewarding in its own way.
So I watched the first part of the Breaking Dawn film adaptation--the first piece of anything Twilight-related I've completed--and paradoxically, it managed to feel both boring and engrossing. Bella, absent the additional context provided by the rest of her story, managed to come off as rather sympathetic throughout, which cannot be said for Edward, Jacob, Charlie, or the plurality of male characters, really. I also really liked Alice, and would have liked to have seen more of Jessica, because Anna Kendrick is awesome.
I also watched A Separation, the Iranian film about the couple whose separation serves as the backdrop for a truly spectacular legal and moral fustercluck. It is amazing, complex, and a fascinating showcase of what happens when parties who have both been wronged (to steal a phrase from Melissa McEwan) worry more about being right than about doing the right thing. Possibly the best film I've seen all year. (Content Note: A significant part of the film deals with a miscarriage [ETA: and Alzheimer's]).
ETA: Also, I've begun a deconstruction series for Mark Crilley's Miki Falls, a graphic novel whose plot parallels Twilight's, and is still to a degree very problematic, but has the benefit of a stronger creator at the helm. It only has two entries for now, but give it a look-see, if you'd like.
Here's the sort of post I would have put up in the Acacia Moon forums a bit ago: musics!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0ow4tGgZWk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIVgSuuUTwQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Tdo-CG3mo
From the Ghost in the Shell soundtrack.
I'm posting from a tablet and apparently Disqus won't let me log on with OpenID.
I'm visiting my mom who is definitely inclined to policing my diet. I have to monitor my carb intake due to diabetes, but she is not helping with her "ZOMG DEATHFATS!"
We're actually having the feast tomorrow to accommodate my sister who is in fire/rescue and prone to volunteering to work on major holidays.
Hello, Ramblites. It's about food time here on Harvest festival day. Been watching the padded rugby squads today, mostly, although it took several hours to get through one game...and then they lost.
Mostly, though, it's the beginning of the session where I start wishing people to have a better year than the last.
I had a lovely Thanksgiving and I hope everyone else who was celebrating did too.
My happy introvert day involved staying home and not talking to anyone, aside from my father who lives here, ;-p. He went to my sister's and tried to nag me into going as well.
Lemme tell you about a conversation my father told me about hearing today at my sister's. He mentioned how in ye olden days they added livermush to the dressing, which my sister dutifully added. Her husband piped in with, 'SiL won't eat it--he hates livermush'. Daughter (ie wife of SiL) says: 'What he doesn't know won't hurt him.' And much merriment was had. And SiL ate livermush, either none the wiser or wise enough not to diss his MiL's cooking.
As someone who would spend the night vomiting after eating some of my no-go (for, I will admit, purely psychological reasons) foods... yeah. I'll pass on the festivities, which also include food policing, if past experience is any indication. I'll eat my 'birdlike' meal or my 'surprisingly large' meal or whatever it shakes out to be in peace. Well, in as much peace as possible with a cat who loves turkey underfoot.
And tomorrow I will go to my other sister's, bearing pies and ham and possibly turkey if I can sneak it out of the house.
The characters in AGoT are very strongly three-dimensional creatures. You think you know them and they'll turn some new angle of themselves into the light. Just goes to show what you can do when you put your mind into creating a world. Not that it's a nice world.
I've blogged about clothes and shoes of historical persuation. Mostly in Finnish though, although I do try to include an English condenced version in the bottom of the post.
And now I need to take the dog out before going to bed. Good night, or day, all.
Happy Thanksgiving to those in the US, and to Japan as well, which is happening at kinda sorta the same time. My niece and nephew are goofy, and their interaction reminds me a lot of being the oldest child growing up and how younger siblings, no matter how much you love them, can really seem to be a pain. >_< Especially when you're a little kid.
And I'm a bit worried, as my cat has worms. We've given her roundworm meds as well as updating her flea and tick meds, but I've got this terrible paranoia of parasites. Ugh.
Self promotion, you say?
Well inspired by you, Ana, as well as awesome folks like Fred Clark and Something Short and Snappy I've started doing my own "Read Along" series. I'm reading Pride & Prejudice and writing commentary but because the book is out of copyright I'm including the whole text of the book so anyone can read along and not miss anything. Anyway if you think that's cool, you could check it out on my blog. Hopefully my name will link to my blog, I don't really know how this works.
Happy Thanksgiving to you folk in the USA who celebrate such things, Happy Thursday to a bunch of the rest of you and Happy Friday to the rest of us. (As I'm only in Australia, Will Wildman is still further into the future than me, but I must say that Friday looks great from here so far)
Happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating today!
And to the cooks--may you be able to convince someone else to do the dishes!
Game of Thrones: no spoilers
Is anyone else having a hard time deciding if you like the characters or not? I keep flopping back and forth on these people. I think that the only character that I like and have liked consistently is Jon, and maybe Arya(I withhold judgement on Arya until she develops a bit more) and even then I don't always enjoy being around Jon.
I have trouble disliking characters consistenly too. Characters I don't like suddenly do something that I enjoy.
I'm only in the first book so far so there's a lot left to get through, so maybe I'll make up my mind eventually.
Oh, this isn't a complaint. I love reading complex characters and I love being suprised by their actions or thoughts. I just find it really unusual that a book with so many characters is managing this when most books can't even keep a single character ambiguous for me.
If you're still on A Game of Thrones, there are various bits of character development and new information to learn about them, so flip-flopping may well occur all the way up to A Storm of Swords at least. As for actually liking anyone... most characters have aspects of themselves that are likeable, I guess? (Some more than others.) There are a few characters in A Feast for Crows who seem like genuinely decent people.
Happy Thanksgiving, USians! Happy Thursday, everyone!
I'm spending my morning pretending to Nano, trying to catch up. Of course, I say pretending, because the brand new video game that Husband just bought, and is now playing, is fascinating, and I'd much rather watch him play than write.
I figure, if I tell enough people that I am writing with the intent to catch up for Nano, maybe eventually it will magically be true.
I hope everyone's day goes well.
@duckbunny -
The URL for advent knowledge is missing something - it tries to go to somewhere on Ana's site. If you don't mind, let's try again - Advent Knowledge: How Does This Work? Hopefully, this goes to the right place.
@Mime_Paradox -
Looks like a good content policy. One thing: "Derp and variations are..." has no consequence, although I assume it's going to be bad, possibly bannably so.
The Pierce Brosnan movies had the best M. And the Craig ones as well, so far.
And she becomes even better under the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen interpretation. Pity the Avengers movie sucked.
So I drafted a comment policy for my secret blog, and given that I have little to no confidence in my judgement when it comes determing what constitutes a problematic statement, I'd really appreciate some feedback on it, from those with the spoons to give it a read.
Re: Skyfall: Without spoiling anything, I feel that the film's ending will give hope to those that don't like the Craig Bond that future films will be more to their liking, as it very much brings things full circle. Unfortunately, when I mean "full circle", I mean all the way back to Dr. No and From Russia With Love (which, by the way, is an excellent film, problematic aspects aside), with all that entails.
Yay! I'm not the only one.
With what is almost definitely the WORST treatment of its women characters (apart from M) of any of them.
Considering this is a Bond movie, that's really saying something!
(Generally speaking, I like Bond movies despite all that's wrong with them. At least when they're being over-the-top wish fulfillment fantasies - which is why I have avoided the Daniel Craig Bond movies. Apparently, rebooting them grim'n'gritty has worked for most people, but it's not what I go for. Though, considering that the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies are my favorites (and not just because he's hot, or because they made some attempt to do well with their women characters - if with mixed results - though both of those things help), it's entirely possible that I have no taste.)
Having just seen Skyfall, I think I'm comfortable saying that it could very well be the best Bond movie ever made...
With what is almost definitely the WORST treatment of its women characters (apart from M) of any of them.
Depends on how you're defining "like" - one of my very favorite characters in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 is Gul Dukat, who spends much of the show being a villain and is demonstrably racist against Bajorans. I'd never want to spend time around someone like him in real life, but as a fictional character he's tremendously entertaining to me, and so I'm always delighted to see him show up.
Likewise. (Well, I wasn't overly exited when the Pah-Wraiths got involved, but that was hardly the worst plot I can think of on that show.)
I was also tremendously fond of Garak, Quark, Odo, Kira, and Damar. I thought DS9 did a pretty good job of showing characters whose moral standards are not really the audiences or the Starfleet characters, but still demonstrably have moral standards. (I was particularly fond with the way the show dealt with changing morality - what was acceptable for Bajorans a thousand years ago isn't any more. Garak and Kira's standards of acceptable behavior haven't really changed much - but who they apply to has changed. Odo has a hard time figuring out the difference between Order and Justice. And so on.)
Something weird going on with your comment, in the email notification I got the whole thing was there, but looking at it here I can only see what you quoted, not what you said regarding the thing you quoted.
Ah Disqus, how we all loathe thee.
I commented that I was failing at NaNo, also. Even though my actual goal was merely to write every day.
"(I have been managing to keep up with NaNo so far,"
If it could be mustered, I would hate you for that.</em
I am failing utterly as well. And my goal was simply to write some every day this month. *sigh* You'd think I could manage that, at least.
Hello various Ramblites! I am speaking to you from the future. At least, it's probably your future, because I am in New Zealand and there aren't a lot of places closer to the International Date Line (I'm 17 hours ahead of my usual time zone, which was a bit of a dizzying change). It is gorgeous and there are volcanoes everywhere and I will be visiting various Lord of the Rings filming sites in the coming weeks, so life is pretty much amazing. Sadly, my internet access is limited (I have enough time every day to check my email, update my NaNo wordcount, and maybe a few news sites) so I will not be posting much for the immediate future, but I will drop by to see what's up if I can. Yay for everything and everyone elsewise.
(I have been managing to keep up with NaNo so far, but this final week may prove a challenge. Things are getting hectic. The heroes have travelled back in time and successfully prevented a murder and are about to discover that was a terrible idea. Yet again, I will not be nearly finished at 50K, but that's okay, my goal is simply to finish the book no matter how long it takes.)
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