veronica (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aberration) wrote2020-04-20 09:40 pm
aberration) wrote2020-04-20 09:40 pm
ship without a pilot in a mighty tempest
Movies I've logged -
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) ★★★★1/2
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) ★★★1/2
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) ★★★1/2
The Sword in the Stone (1963) ★★★
Tigertail (2020) ★★★★
Mary Poppins (1964) ★★★
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) ★★★★
Before Sunrise (1995) ★★★★1/2
The Jungle Book (1967) ★★1/2
Crazy Rich Asians (2018) ★★★★
The Aristocats (1970) ★★★
Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) ★★★
And a couple books –
This is a collection of short stories, most but not all of which have some kind of sci-fi/fantasy bent, and all of which are about female characters. And… for me, its vibe was a very dated brand of feminism. The girls who are generally the heroes in these stories are all into STEM fields, in contrast with their annoying mothers or aunts or other girls who like clothes or making cakes or whatever. Liking cooking can sometimes be okay if what you like in particular is the chemistry behind it, but if you have the audacity to just like preparing icebox cakes for guests in your home then you're right out. To be clear, it would be fine if this were a collection of stories about girls and women who were into STEM, it's the constant 'NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS' that makes it really grating.
I mean okay, it probably didn't help that the very first story in this collection is about a little girl being absolutely persecuted by her parents and babysitter for… liking Maleficent from the Disney Sleeping Beauty. She cries at the end of the movie because Everyone Was Mean to Maleficent, who was so clearly so much better than the other fairies because they are old and fat and idk make a cake and a dress. And she gets a Maleficent doll that people keep trying to hide from her because it's an 'ugly old witch.' Like okay I don't know if Klages had weird relatives, but Maleficent was always designed to be a gorgeous femme-fatale type, and she's been beloved since Sleeping Beauty first premiered, I don't know what to tell you, liking Maleficent has never exactly been out of the mainstream.
But in any case, these stories are generally about girls who live in the 1950s to 1970s maybe, or sometimes in the future, and some kind of science thing comes up and also maybe magic. One girl is the daughter of a magician and relates to him over the chemistry and physics that go into his acts. One girl learns about magic numbers from a mathematician guest of her mother's while her mother… dares to not know much about math while also serving cake. A couple women in a vague middle ages time use chemistry to trick a jewel thief. A girl has to save her friend from some kind of weird boardgames witch. In a vague distant future a girl says goodbye to her friend because she's going to be leaving with her parents in one of those spaceships that takes hundreds of years to get to its destination.
Which, plenty of these would be interesting to me in theory, but I generally either found the way the story played out just not that interesting, or felt further smacked in the head with 'SHE LIKES STEM AND NOT LIPSTICK SHE'S NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS.' And some that I would have found interesting either just didn't delve into the subject in depth enough (such as the story of an astronaut on a mission to Mars who realizes mid-flight that she's pregnant and so has to basically stay on Mars indefinitely with her child because her child wouldn't survive returning to Earth), or are literally just long enough to describe an idea for an interesting story and then that's the end (what if there was a story from the perspective of Mrs. Hudson from Sherlock Holmes okay story over – it was barely two pages long, if that).
The only story I'd say I unequivocally enjoyed was called "Singing on a Star," about a young girl whose friend has discovered a secret world in her closet. It's strange and somewhat sinister, and there really isn't time to remind me that baking is stupid. And looking at these stories again I guess I also felt similarly about "Echoes of Aurora" about a tree that turns into a lesbian.
But the story that really cemented my feelings on this collection came at the end. Called "Woodsmoke," it's about a twelve-ish year old girl at a vaguely 1960s-ish girl's summer camp. She spends a lot of time thinking about how she can't wait to get to camp where she can go by "Peete" instead of "Patty," get away from her stupid mother who likes dresses, and be around the camp counselors who are good at cool things like hiking and building fires and etc. (Like again I'm not even against say, a collection of stories about girls like Peete, but it's pretty noticeable when "ANYTHING VAGUELY FEMININE IS ASININE" is basically flashing in the background.) Peete is paired up with a girl named Maggie as they're both going to be staying at the camp the whole summer, and it first looks like Maggie engages in a few more 'traditionally feminine' things in her manners and appearance, but she is also a missionaries' daughter who was raised in rural Vietnam and so knows about whittling and hiking and peeing outside so that makes up for it. The story is very much young girls grow close while at summer camp, even including such fanfiction tropes as Have To Share A Bed (which… they're twelve… like I get it but also it felt so weirdly like 'I want to use this trope' for a story about twelve year olds…)
And then Maggie starts to experience pains that the camp counselors assume are the start of her menses, but a doctor announces is actually previously undiagnosed undescended testicles. End of story.
Which like, what the fuck.
Look, it'd be one thing if this story were exploring an intersex character, but this is not the case at all. It's just some random, Crying Game-esque twist literally right at the end. And then the narrative explicitly refers to Maggie as a boy, which seems… vaguely transphobic? Like, whelp testicles, This Person Is A Boy Now.
So yeah, that clamped pretty hard down on by general negative vibe from this collection. I actually checked if this had been published a while ago, and while many of the stories had been previously published, the collection itself is from 2017 so. I don't know, again, this just felt like a very, very dated kind of feminism.
I don't have a lot to say about Black Beauty. It was definitely a book about a horse. That was on the tin, I can't complain. There were points where I was thinking "Anna Sewell you are really stretching the horse relevance to make pretty unrelated political comments" but.
Beyond that, we're still locked down! Not that much is happening. Despite working from home it feels like a struggle to get through those days of work, even if I vaguely have more energy around them? But it's just even harder than it usually is to feel either motivated or focused, even though there are things I am doing and still am able to do. Kind of. But my supervisor has this a lot worse for various reasons and so I haven't really been very pressed at all about productivity. And I am getting things done, it's just. In any case, still ridiculously lucky, so it's hard to complain about much.
Otherwise, I went on my periodic Sims binge because The Sims 4 was on sale for like $5 and I'm an idiot. I've gotten really into an app called Happy Color that is like a coloring book app but it's just color-according-to-the-numbers, so a relaxing dream for kids who wanted to color inside the lines. It has a ton of free content so I don't mind that it also makes you watch a lot of ads, I just wish those didn't so frequently involve weird murder puzzles? Which is made all the weirder because the apps they're advertising seem to mostly be games about landscaping? I just wanted to relax and mindlessly color pretty pictures please stop threatening this guy with lava I don't.
And we've been cooking a lot of things out of the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge Cookbook. Which given that we've now made a lot of things from it I may write up a review of it as well at some point. There was I think a previous official Star Wars cookbook, which had recipes for Star Wars-themed food like 'wookiees cookies' and 'Boba Fett-uccine.' This one tries to create food that would exist in-universe, which given that the movies don't exactly have a strong food tradition outside blue milk seems like it would be a challenge, and also comes off like a lot of time was spent flipping through the food-related articles on Wookieepedia which, you know, relatable. But despite our initially making fun of its name, this book's 'topato soup' has become a quarantine staple for us, it's pretty easy to make and nice and warm and spicy. Granted I've also now made two loaves of Twi'lek mushroom bread. Which you know, is naturally what I've been doing rather than sourdough. But that's where a lot of my 'I don't have to commute now' energy has been going.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) ★★★★1/2
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) ★★★1/2
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) ★★★1/2
The Sword in the Stone (1963) ★★★
Tigertail (2020) ★★★★
Mary Poppins (1964) ★★★
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) ★★★★
Before Sunrise (1995) ★★★★1/2
The Jungle Book (1967) ★★1/2
Crazy Rich Asians (2018) ★★★★
The Aristocats (1970) ★★★
Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) ★★★
And a couple books –
This is a collection of short stories, most but not all of which have some kind of sci-fi/fantasy bent, and all of which are about female characters. And… for me, its vibe was a very dated brand of feminism. The girls who are generally the heroes in these stories are all into STEM fields, in contrast with their annoying mothers or aunts or other girls who like clothes or making cakes or whatever. Liking cooking can sometimes be okay if what you like in particular is the chemistry behind it, but if you have the audacity to just like preparing icebox cakes for guests in your home then you're right out. To be clear, it would be fine if this were a collection of stories about girls and women who were into STEM, it's the constant 'NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS' that makes it really grating.
I mean okay, it probably didn't help that the very first story in this collection is about a little girl being absolutely persecuted by her parents and babysitter for… liking Maleficent from the Disney Sleeping Beauty. She cries at the end of the movie because Everyone Was Mean to Maleficent, who was so clearly so much better than the other fairies because they are old and fat and idk make a cake and a dress. And she gets a Maleficent doll that people keep trying to hide from her because it's an 'ugly old witch.' Like okay I don't know if Klages had weird relatives, but Maleficent was always designed to be a gorgeous femme-fatale type, and she's been beloved since Sleeping Beauty first premiered, I don't know what to tell you, liking Maleficent has never exactly been out of the mainstream.
But in any case, these stories are generally about girls who live in the 1950s to 1970s maybe, or sometimes in the future, and some kind of science thing comes up and also maybe magic. One girl is the daughter of a magician and relates to him over the chemistry and physics that go into his acts. One girl learns about magic numbers from a mathematician guest of her mother's while her mother… dares to not know much about math while also serving cake. A couple women in a vague middle ages time use chemistry to trick a jewel thief. A girl has to save her friend from some kind of weird boardgames witch. In a vague distant future a girl says goodbye to her friend because she's going to be leaving with her parents in one of those spaceships that takes hundreds of years to get to its destination.
Which, plenty of these would be interesting to me in theory, but I generally either found the way the story played out just not that interesting, or felt further smacked in the head with 'SHE LIKES STEM AND NOT LIPSTICK SHE'S NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS.' And some that I would have found interesting either just didn't delve into the subject in depth enough (such as the story of an astronaut on a mission to Mars who realizes mid-flight that she's pregnant and so has to basically stay on Mars indefinitely with her child because her child wouldn't survive returning to Earth), or are literally just long enough to describe an idea for an interesting story and then that's the end (what if there was a story from the perspective of Mrs. Hudson from Sherlock Holmes okay story over – it was barely two pages long, if that).
The only story I'd say I unequivocally enjoyed was called "Singing on a Star," about a young girl whose friend has discovered a secret world in her closet. It's strange and somewhat sinister, and there really isn't time to remind me that baking is stupid. And looking at these stories again I guess I also felt similarly about "Echoes of Aurora" about a tree that turns into a lesbian.
But the story that really cemented my feelings on this collection came at the end. Called "Woodsmoke," it's about a twelve-ish year old girl at a vaguely 1960s-ish girl's summer camp. She spends a lot of time thinking about how she can't wait to get to camp where she can go by "Peete" instead of "Patty," get away from her stupid mother who likes dresses, and be around the camp counselors who are good at cool things like hiking and building fires and etc. (Like again I'm not even against say, a collection of stories about girls like Peete, but it's pretty noticeable when "ANYTHING VAGUELY FEMININE IS ASININE" is basically flashing in the background.) Peete is paired up with a girl named Maggie as they're both going to be staying at the camp the whole summer, and it first looks like Maggie engages in a few more 'traditionally feminine' things in her manners and appearance, but she is also a missionaries' daughter who was raised in rural Vietnam and so knows about whittling and hiking and peeing outside so that makes up for it. The story is very much young girls grow close while at summer camp, even including such fanfiction tropes as Have To Share A Bed (which… they're twelve… like I get it but also it felt so weirdly like 'I want to use this trope' for a story about twelve year olds…)
And then Maggie starts to experience pains that the camp counselors assume are the start of her menses, but a doctor announces is actually previously undiagnosed undescended testicles. End of story.
Which like, what the fuck.
Look, it'd be one thing if this story were exploring an intersex character, but this is not the case at all. It's just some random, Crying Game-esque twist literally right at the end. And then the narrative explicitly refers to Maggie as a boy, which seems… vaguely transphobic? Like, whelp testicles, This Person Is A Boy Now.
So yeah, that clamped pretty hard down on by general negative vibe from this collection. I actually checked if this had been published a while ago, and while many of the stories had been previously published, the collection itself is from 2017 so. I don't know, again, this just felt like a very, very dated kind of feminism.
I don't have a lot to say about Black Beauty. It was definitely a book about a horse. That was on the tin, I can't complain. There were points where I was thinking "Anna Sewell you are really stretching the horse relevance to make pretty unrelated political comments" but.
Beyond that, we're still locked down! Not that much is happening. Despite working from home it feels like a struggle to get through those days of work, even if I vaguely have more energy around them? But it's just even harder than it usually is to feel either motivated or focused, even though there are things I am doing and still am able to do. Kind of. But my supervisor has this a lot worse for various reasons and so I haven't really been very pressed at all about productivity. And I am getting things done, it's just. In any case, still ridiculously lucky, so it's hard to complain about much.
Otherwise, I went on my periodic Sims binge because The Sims 4 was on sale for like $5 and I'm an idiot. I've gotten really into an app called Happy Color that is like a coloring book app but it's just color-according-to-the-numbers, so a relaxing dream for kids who wanted to color inside the lines. It has a ton of free content so I don't mind that it also makes you watch a lot of ads, I just wish those didn't so frequently involve weird murder puzzles? Which is made all the weirder because the apps they're advertising seem to mostly be games about landscaping? I just wanted to relax and mindlessly color pretty pictures please stop threatening this guy with lava I don't.
And we've been cooking a lot of things out of the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge Cookbook. Which given that we've now made a lot of things from it I may write up a review of it as well at some point. There was I think a previous official Star Wars cookbook, which had recipes for Star Wars-themed food like 'wookiees cookies' and 'Boba Fett-uccine.' This one tries to create food that would exist in-universe, which given that the movies don't exactly have a strong food tradition outside blue milk seems like it would be a challenge, and also comes off like a lot of time was spent flipping through the food-related articles on Wookieepedia which, you know, relatable. But despite our initially making fun of its name, this book's 'topato soup' has become a quarantine staple for us, it's pretty easy to make and nice and warm and spicy. Granted I've also now made two loaves of Twi'lek mushroom bread. Which you know, is naturally what I've been doing rather than sourdough. But that's where a lot of my 'I don't have to commute now' energy has been going.