veronica (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aberration) wrote2020-08-02 05:46 pm
aberration) wrote2020-08-02 05:46 pm
there's a danger in the things you say
Movies I've logged:
Hamilton (2020) ★★★★
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) ★★★
Clue (1985) ★★★1/2
The Old Guard (2020) ★★★1/2
DuckTales: The Movie – Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990) ★1/2
The Rescuers Down Under (1990) ★★★
My Neighbor Totoro (1988) ★★★★★
Beauty and the Beast (1991) ★★★★1/2
The Fifth Element (1997) ★★★
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) ★★★1/2
Also I already reviewed it up there but I'm going to talk about exactly one trope thing in The Old Guard, so spoilers for that –
So there's this scene when Joe and Nicky have been abducted by the pharmaceutical people and one of the soldier-pharmaceutical-something people derisively refers to Joe as Nicky's boyfriend and Nicky confronts them with this speech about how unimaginably deep and powerful their love is. And this is like this specific type of trope, that's broadly along the lines of a character bombastically declaring (or even just mentally doing so) 'I have this experience that you can't possibly imagine', that I've seen in a lot of different media and I know many people love it. In this particular instance I was fine with it because it was genuinely justified, the abductor guys were obviously being dicks and I can definitely connect to the desire/catharsis of speaking to the power and validity of a queer relationship.
(ETA: I'm pretty sure I've switched which character had the speech look they weren't really super differentiated personality-wise okay.)
That being said I have a hard time enjoying it because I feel like most of the time when I see it, it's a character basically going on about how no one can possibly understand them, no one can possibly have had emotions and experiences like they have, they are the only people who can understand or do certain things, and just like. Being honest, most of the time this just reads as incredibly immature, self-centered, and selfish to me. It's one thing to see characters who are children/teenagers doing it because I guess I think children need to be pretty self-centered for their own survival and development and it's more a shame when they aren't afforded that. But adults just – no! You should know better??? You should know that you can't truly know and anticipate others' experiences????? And yet when this trope pops up it only really seems to be children where the narrative calls them on it and they have to learn a lesson like 'wait I need to realize that I can't presume others' experiences.'
So I guess I'm saying I know this is a big trope people love but unless it's justified by like, casual homophobia, or another instance involving some kind of privilege/lack thereof, I'm probably going to hate it. And even when it is justified I feel cringey because I'm so used to it being that.
Anyway, I guess in real life, but also extremely not -
I've been having incredibly vivid dreams basically since lockdown began. In the first month or so I repeatedly had dreams where I felt like I couldn't breathe; one time I'd dozed off next tovaradia and she could hear how my breathing changed, but once I woke up I felt fine. I'm glad I haven't had those in a while now, but I still often have very vivid dreams, often covid related. In one instance I had to go to a class in public, and then I had this enormous scary bruise on my chest, and when I woke I was first pretty relieved that the scary bruise wasn't real and then extremely relieved that I hadn't actually gone to that class.
I've also had instances of sleep paralysis, though that isn't that unusual for me. I think I'm kind of lucky about it because I've never really had hallucinations with it. The closest was one time it happened when my mother was in the room and I could see her, and I asked her several times to come over to me and she said no, and then I finally realized none of that was really happening. I have also had the dread sense that something sinister is nearby, but that's never actually come to seeing some scary being, and I usually have the wherewithal to recognize what's happening and know that the sense of dread is because I'm feeling especially vulnerable. But most recently it went on long enough that I understood what was happening and struggled to break out of it, and I could only slightly move my arm and make a growling sound in my throat. It's not very pleasant
But I do sometimes do a thing around the same time of nodding off and then waking up and then nodding off again without realizing it. In one instance I kept thinking I was awake and wandering through the apartment until something would happen that wasn't exactly scary, but unnerving? That made me realize I wasn't awake. Like one time it was that a dog ran up to me, but the dog was completely blue. Not cartoony, just a normal dog but blue. And then I'd try to force myself awake, but I'd wake up to sleep paralysis. Another time I had dreams that our landlord had built an apartment around ours so that we had to go through another family's apartment to get out, but also somehow our apartment contained the front door of this building so people kept coming through it? And people kept getting close to me and not wearing masks. Then I'd wake up and I'd be withvaradia telling her this, and she'd say "no that's real" and then I'd realize I was dreaming again and it was extremely freaky
Anyway, I used to be I think not terrible in crowds and now I wonder if that'll be completely fucked up even after this.
In actual real life, things continue to not be very different.varadia has to go back to the office which is annoying but mostly not really… frightening? Because she doesn't have to use public transport and the precautions being taken do seem essentially adequate. Meanwhile I have no idea what will be happening with my job any time soon when it comes to that, I don't see how in the near future we can approach anything close to what was normal before this, so… I'm glad my employer at least seems to be resisting any rush back to normality but also the perpetual uncertainty isn't that fun! But again I know I'm better off than so many it's hard to. Whatever.
So you know, reading, watching movies, etc.
And so looking for something to put in my book series spot, I read the first Murderbot book and did not decide to continue, cut for being negative -
I just did not find the narrative voice here convincing at all, and this doesn't seem like something that's going to work for me if I can't do that. It was like the author was going on and on about what an introvert she was while also simultaneously repeatedly saying she was a robot for some reason and I spent most of it think "okay, no, you're not a robot, you're just an introvert." And honestly I feel like a big part of this is how the author seems to be so intent on selling this protagonist as Relatable and I'm like, okay yes I Too Am Awkward and Awkward At Talking To People and Want To Be Left Alone To Watch My Shows and yet none of that makes me a robot and especially not a robot created to do a specific job and presumably actively discouraged/impeded from doing anything aside from that. I'm not saying an android/cyborg/I'm actually not entirely sure what the proper term for them is has to act, well, robotic, but I should be able to reconcile my understanding of where this being came from with what came through as 'basically a reasonably well-adjusted normal person who is also an introvert' and I just couldn't do that. Though I guess I also have a preference for 'start from a place of difference and then work toward the commonality.'
That being said I also felt like I didn't understand most people's motivations, which isn't necessarily always a problem, but I feel like at minimum I should understand the potential consequences of certain choices, like Murderbot's ultimate choice at the end, and I … didn't. So I just. I don't know, it didn't matter to me.
Though I'll admit to sometimes being a big stickler about my particular idea of these, so.
And then I read A Wizard of Earthsea which I liked fine, but as I approached the end I was just thinking 'idk this is fine but I'm not sure I want to read however-many-books-are-in-this-series of it' and then at the end came around to 'maybe I could come back to this but I need to read something else first.' So I started N.K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon and I am really liking that.
I also read Amy Poehler's memoir Yes Please and that was also fine. On the scale of celebrity memoirs, it's certainly more coherent than a lot of them, but it also ultimately reads like a series of blog posts. It's also not exactly Poehler's fault that the constant namedropping of Louis C.K. doesn't exactly read well now but. Reading this also coincided with what seems like a lot of shit coming out of UCB, so maybe not the best timing.
And because there always has to be a Star Wars book in the mix, I read Star Wars Myths & Legends, which I had been hoping would be something like in-universe fairytales from the SW universe, but ended up just basically being short stories that were sometimes additional stories about existing characters. Which I guess is what I should have expected but was still disappointing, and I wouldn't say I found any of these particularly interesting, but, for details –
The Knight & the Dragon – Basically during his years on Tatooine Obi-Wan hypnotized a Krayt dragon into not bothering a group of Tuskens anymore, so okay.
The Droid with a Heart – One of the droids working for Grievous in the Clone Wars gets mad at him for being an asshole and fucks up one of his battle plans, leading to a Republic victory, because Actually Droids Are Sentient.
Vengeful Waves – The first one of these that does not center on an existing franchise character. It takes place on Glee Anselm, an ocean planet that's the homeworld of the Nautolan and Anselmi species. In this story the Anselmi moved above water and built a vast empire but that made the Ocean Spirit mad and she destroyed it all because of their greed. Which would be a perfectly acceptable creation myth except it all just read like something that really happened. I guess part of the problem is magic is a literal thing in this world so there isn't that easy way to distinguish it, but I don't think that alone is really the issue.
The Wanderer – A random Jedi visits a city three times when it's in trouble due to some calamity. I don't know there isn't much more to it than that, and again it doesn't read like a fable or myth but like a thing that really happened. While I really don't want these stories to all be about existing characters, given a later story it might have worked better if this Jedi was unsubtly Anakin Skywalker, but he is not.
The Black Spire – A young girl on Batuu saves her siblings from enslavement. Not much more to it, and again it's just like, a thing that happened. She's inspired by another random Jedi and can I just say none of these random mysterious stranger Jedi are women? They're all like clearly vaguely bearded Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon-looking wise men dudes.
Gaze of Stone – A Sith Master recruits a Twi'lek apprentice who eventually tries to kill him by cursing him to turn to stone but the Sith Master tricks the apprentice and apprentice ends up turning himself to stone instead. This might have read as a fairy tale if it hadn't started out with "actually this is exactly why that Twi'lek statue is there."
The Witch & the Wookiee – A group of pirates wander through an empty forest and find a house filled with treasure and an old woman who feeds them. The pirates then try to kill her to steal her treasure, and her Wookiee familiar attacks and defeats them. She lets the pirates leave, but they find that any treasure they touch from then on disappears. This was probably my favorite of the stories, though a) honestly to be a woman with agency in these stories you have to be a Witch, of course and b) it's weird that she has what they explicitly call a "familiar" that's a Wookiee like, Wookiees are sentient? Not pets?
The Dark Wraith – Going back to that city with a lot of calamities before, whenever children or adults act out a "dark wraith" with a red blade comes and kills them or takes them away. The wraith is very clearly Darth Vader, so this is the first story I'm… fairly confident is not supposed to have literally happened.
Chasing Ghosts – A bounty hunter is chasing a smuggler person I think, and they both end up in Batuu, and the smuggler manages to get away by going into Oga's Cantina and telling the crowd about a very famous thief with an enormous bounty who had been seen on Batuu only days ago, so bounty hunter goes after her instead and the smuggler gets away, very smug because he'd made the thief up entirely and I guess this bounty hunter is pretty stupid. Which again, this is just a thing happening.
So yeah, I can't say this is worth reading unless you have a young child who is super into Star Wars. Which is a perfectly good reason for it! I'd just … like an attempt at what in-universe fables or fairy tales or myths would look like.
And also we finally finished playing Jedi Fallen Order and I really liked it a lot! Once the actual emotional story became clear. Which took a bit, maybe partly but not entirely because, uh, I suck at playing combat video games. But I'll write that up later.
Hamilton (2020) ★★★★
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) ★★★
Clue (1985) ★★★1/2
The Old Guard (2020) ★★★1/2
DuckTales: The Movie – Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990) ★1/2
The Rescuers Down Under (1990) ★★★
My Neighbor Totoro (1988) ★★★★★
Beauty and the Beast (1991) ★★★★1/2
The Fifth Element (1997) ★★★
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) ★★★1/2
Also I already reviewed it up there but I'm going to talk about exactly one trope thing in The Old Guard, so spoilers for that –
So there's this scene when Joe and Nicky have been abducted by the pharmaceutical people and one of the soldier-pharmaceutical-something people derisively refers to Joe as Nicky's boyfriend and Nicky confronts them with this speech about how unimaginably deep and powerful their love is. And this is like this specific type of trope, that's broadly along the lines of a character bombastically declaring (or even just mentally doing so) 'I have this experience that you can't possibly imagine', that I've seen in a lot of different media and I know many people love it. In this particular instance I was fine with it because it was genuinely justified, the abductor guys were obviously being dicks and I can definitely connect to the desire/catharsis of speaking to the power and validity of a queer relationship.
(ETA: I'm pretty sure I've switched which character had the speech look they weren't really super differentiated personality-wise okay.)
That being said I have a hard time enjoying it because I feel like most of the time when I see it, it's a character basically going on about how no one can possibly understand them, no one can possibly have had emotions and experiences like they have, they are the only people who can understand or do certain things, and just like. Being honest, most of the time this just reads as incredibly immature, self-centered, and selfish to me. It's one thing to see characters who are children/teenagers doing it because I guess I think children need to be pretty self-centered for their own survival and development and it's more a shame when they aren't afforded that. But adults just – no! You should know better??? You should know that you can't truly know and anticipate others' experiences????? And yet when this trope pops up it only really seems to be children where the narrative calls them on it and they have to learn a lesson like 'wait I need to realize that I can't presume others' experiences.'
So I guess I'm saying I know this is a big trope people love but unless it's justified by like, casual homophobia, or another instance involving some kind of privilege/lack thereof, I'm probably going to hate it. And even when it is justified I feel cringey because I'm so used to it being that.
Anyway, I guess in real life, but also extremely not -
I've been having incredibly vivid dreams basically since lockdown began. In the first month or so I repeatedly had dreams where I felt like I couldn't breathe; one time I'd dozed off next to
varadia and she could hear how my breathing changed, but once I woke up I felt fine. I'm glad I haven't had those in a while now, but I still often have very vivid dreams, often covid related. In one instance I had to go to a class in public, and then I had this enormous scary bruise on my chest, and when I woke I was first pretty relieved that the scary bruise wasn't real and then extremely relieved that I hadn't actually gone to that class. I've also had instances of sleep paralysis, though that isn't that unusual for me. I think I'm kind of lucky about it because I've never really had hallucinations with it. The closest was one time it happened when my mother was in the room and I could see her, and I asked her several times to come over to me and she said no, and then I finally realized none of that was really happening. I have also had the dread sense that something sinister is nearby, but that's never actually come to seeing some scary being, and I usually have the wherewithal to recognize what's happening and know that the sense of dread is because I'm feeling especially vulnerable. But most recently it went on long enough that I understood what was happening and struggled to break out of it, and I could only slightly move my arm and make a growling sound in my throat. It's not very pleasant
But I do sometimes do a thing around the same time of nodding off and then waking up and then nodding off again without realizing it. In one instance I kept thinking I was awake and wandering through the apartment until something would happen that wasn't exactly scary, but unnerving? That made me realize I wasn't awake. Like one time it was that a dog ran up to me, but the dog was completely blue. Not cartoony, just a normal dog but blue. And then I'd try to force myself awake, but I'd wake up to sleep paralysis. Another time I had dreams that our landlord had built an apartment around ours so that we had to go through another family's apartment to get out, but also somehow our apartment contained the front door of this building so people kept coming through it? And people kept getting close to me and not wearing masks. Then I'd wake up and I'd be with
varadia telling her this, and she'd say "no that's real" and then I'd realize I was dreaming again and it was extremely freaky Anyway, I used to be I think not terrible in crowds and now I wonder if that'll be completely fucked up even after this.
In actual real life, things continue to not be very different.
varadia has to go back to the office which is annoying but mostly not really… frightening? Because she doesn't have to use public transport and the precautions being taken do seem essentially adequate. Meanwhile I have no idea what will be happening with my job any time soon when it comes to that, I don't see how in the near future we can approach anything close to what was normal before this, so… I'm glad my employer at least seems to be resisting any rush back to normality but also the perpetual uncertainty isn't that fun! But again I know I'm better off than so many it's hard to. Whatever.So you know, reading, watching movies, etc.
And so looking for something to put in my book series spot, I read the first Murderbot book and did not decide to continue, cut for being negative -
I just did not find the narrative voice here convincing at all, and this doesn't seem like something that's going to work for me if I can't do that. It was like the author was going on and on about what an introvert she was while also simultaneously repeatedly saying she was a robot for some reason and I spent most of it think "okay, no, you're not a robot, you're just an introvert." And honestly I feel like a big part of this is how the author seems to be so intent on selling this protagonist as Relatable and I'm like, okay yes I Too Am Awkward and Awkward At Talking To People and Want To Be Left Alone To Watch My Shows and yet none of that makes me a robot and especially not a robot created to do a specific job and presumably actively discouraged/impeded from doing anything aside from that. I'm not saying an android/cyborg/I'm actually not entirely sure what the proper term for them is has to act, well, robotic, but I should be able to reconcile my understanding of where this being came from with what came through as 'basically a reasonably well-adjusted normal person who is also an introvert' and I just couldn't do that. Though I guess I also have a preference for 'start from a place of difference and then work toward the commonality.'
That being said I also felt like I didn't understand most people's motivations, which isn't necessarily always a problem, but I feel like at minimum I should understand the potential consequences of certain choices, like Murderbot's ultimate choice at the end, and I … didn't. So I just. I don't know, it didn't matter to me.
Though I'll admit to sometimes being a big stickler about my particular idea of these, so.
And then I read A Wizard of Earthsea which I liked fine, but as I approached the end I was just thinking 'idk this is fine but I'm not sure I want to read however-many-books-are-in-this-series of it' and then at the end came around to 'maybe I could come back to this but I need to read something else first.' So I started N.K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon and I am really liking that.
I also read Amy Poehler's memoir Yes Please and that was also fine. On the scale of celebrity memoirs, it's certainly more coherent than a lot of them, but it also ultimately reads like a series of blog posts. It's also not exactly Poehler's fault that the constant namedropping of Louis C.K. doesn't exactly read well now but. Reading this also coincided with what seems like a lot of shit coming out of UCB, so maybe not the best timing.
And because there always has to be a Star Wars book in the mix, I read Star Wars Myths & Legends, which I had been hoping would be something like in-universe fairytales from the SW universe, but ended up just basically being short stories that were sometimes additional stories about existing characters. Which I guess is what I should have expected but was still disappointing, and I wouldn't say I found any of these particularly interesting, but, for details –
The Knight & the Dragon – Basically during his years on Tatooine Obi-Wan hypnotized a Krayt dragon into not bothering a group of Tuskens anymore, so okay.
The Droid with a Heart – One of the droids working for Grievous in the Clone Wars gets mad at him for being an asshole and fucks up one of his battle plans, leading to a Republic victory, because Actually Droids Are Sentient.
Vengeful Waves – The first one of these that does not center on an existing franchise character. It takes place on Glee Anselm, an ocean planet that's the homeworld of the Nautolan and Anselmi species. In this story the Anselmi moved above water and built a vast empire but that made the Ocean Spirit mad and she destroyed it all because of their greed. Which would be a perfectly acceptable creation myth except it all just read like something that really happened. I guess part of the problem is magic is a literal thing in this world so there isn't that easy way to distinguish it, but I don't think that alone is really the issue.
The Wanderer – A random Jedi visits a city three times when it's in trouble due to some calamity. I don't know there isn't much more to it than that, and again it doesn't read like a fable or myth but like a thing that really happened. While I really don't want these stories to all be about existing characters, given a later story it might have worked better if this Jedi was unsubtly Anakin Skywalker, but he is not.
The Black Spire – A young girl on Batuu saves her siblings from enslavement. Not much more to it, and again it's just like, a thing that happened. She's inspired by another random Jedi and can I just say none of these random mysterious stranger Jedi are women? They're all like clearly vaguely bearded Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon-looking wise men dudes.
Gaze of Stone – A Sith Master recruits a Twi'lek apprentice who eventually tries to kill him by cursing him to turn to stone but the Sith Master tricks the apprentice and apprentice ends up turning himself to stone instead. This might have read as a fairy tale if it hadn't started out with "actually this is exactly why that Twi'lek statue is there."
The Witch & the Wookiee – A group of pirates wander through an empty forest and find a house filled with treasure and an old woman who feeds them. The pirates then try to kill her to steal her treasure, and her Wookiee familiar attacks and defeats them. She lets the pirates leave, but they find that any treasure they touch from then on disappears. This was probably my favorite of the stories, though a) honestly to be a woman with agency in these stories you have to be a Witch, of course and b) it's weird that she has what they explicitly call a "familiar" that's a Wookiee like, Wookiees are sentient? Not pets?
The Dark Wraith – Going back to that city with a lot of calamities before, whenever children or adults act out a "dark wraith" with a red blade comes and kills them or takes them away. The wraith is very clearly Darth Vader, so this is the first story I'm… fairly confident is not supposed to have literally happened.
Chasing Ghosts – A bounty hunter is chasing a smuggler person I think, and they both end up in Batuu, and the smuggler manages to get away by going into Oga's Cantina and telling the crowd about a very famous thief with an enormous bounty who had been seen on Batuu only days ago, so bounty hunter goes after her instead and the smuggler gets away, very smug because he'd made the thief up entirely and I guess this bounty hunter is pretty stupid. Which again, this is just a thing happening.
So yeah, I can't say this is worth reading unless you have a young child who is super into Star Wars. Which is a perfectly good reason for it! I'd just … like an attempt at what in-universe fables or fairy tales or myths would look like.
And also we finally finished playing Jedi Fallen Order and I really liked it a lot! Once the actual emotional story became clear. Which took a bit, maybe partly but not entirely because, uh, I suck at playing combat video games. But I'll write that up later.