brainwane: My smiling face, including a small gold bindi (Default)
[personal profile] brainwane
Watching: Small Island as I mentioned on my other blog. It's available to watch for about 22 more hours -- I recommend it.

Via [community profile] vidding: a bunch of the VidUKon premieres. The Temeraire fan trailer and "Raising Hell" (on The Good Place particularly spoke to me.

Leonard and I at some point in the last few weeks tried out Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts for a couple episodes and I just did not care for it. It's for children! I'm an adult and sometimes I like things for grown-ups. And I didn't like the main character, and I can't remember what all else I didn't care for.

Then in the past week we started Schitt's Creek and we're about 8 or 9 episodes in now. It took 2 or 3 episodes for me to really start liking the characters and trusting the situations. I came in assuming it would feel a lot like Arrested Development but it's much sweeter.

Listening: My friend's freeform radio show, "Jedi Mind Tricks" -- I really liked his Father's Day show. And my spouse's old colleague's blues podcast, "The Roadhouse", and the dancey? droney? "International Geophysical Year" by mykescipark.

And there's a new animated music video for Rush's "The Spirit of Radio" and it's lovely!

Playing: Animal Crossing. A friend gave us an asteroid! It floats a bit above the ground and gently rotates. Also we now have a golden slingshot, which will come in handy!

Reading: A bunch of Star Trek fanfic over the weekend, such as the mid-1990s DS9 series "Jeu-Parti" by Macedon (am still in the midst of this) and the reboot-movieverse series "Keshta'shivau" by Beatrice_Otter (see my Archive of Our Own bookmarks). I recommend "Keshta'shivau" to your particular attention if you like Vulcans and people straightforwardly negotiating their relationship needs, and people fighting harmful institutions to protect people they love.

I finished KJ Charles's "Sins of the Cities" trilogy, starting with An Unseen Attraction. I hadn't seen this structure before, where one major mystery trails through three different romance stories, each of which has their own romantic pair of heroes. It's neat! I loved many of the characters and their conversations, and I appreciated how each romantic pair had one person doing a job that was kinda unacceptable in polite society even though it gave many people harmless pleasure (which, I presume, also reflects some things KJ Charles might feel about writing romance).

I read Rose Lerner's A Lily Among Thorns and liked some things and disliked others. (I think if I'm going to keep reading historical romances set in England in the early 1800s I am going to have to learn a bit about Napoleon.) I didn't come into it set up with the expectation that there would be two romance plotlines, with a total of four viewpoint characters, and I sort of frequently felt a bit disoriented as I tried to remember what this person wanted, what secrets they were keeping, etc. But I liked most of the characters and I liked the interior and spoken monologues one of them gave on chemistry and fashion. So far my favorite Rose Lerner romance is Listen to the Moon which has an absorbing B-plot about a new manager coming into a house and overhauling its management.

And: at some point many months back, I saw something that made me want to try Paul J Bennett's Servant of the Crown (the first in his "Heir to the Crown" series). I no longer remember what that was, and I'm curious, because I'm halfway through Servant of the Crown and it's a not-super-polished medieval fantasy story about a warrior in a kingdom. The plot clips along pretty fast, and I like the main characters all right, but the sentence-level writing is infelicitous and there is nothing particularly intriguing about the setting or premise. Why did past Sumana think "maybe I will like this"? Maybe tax policy comes up at some point.

I also read and enjoyed the first chapter of Zen Cho's new book The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water and am gonna read the book soon (a paper copy).

There's work reading too, like this Python Enhancement Proposal about the governance of the developers of packaging tools, but I'm gonna leave that out here.

(no subject)

Date: 2020-06-24 10:35 pm (UTC)
skygiants: Izumi and Sig Curtis from Fullmetal Alchemist embracing in front of a giant heart (curtises!)
From: [personal profile] skygiants
Sins of the Cities is probably my favorite set of Charleses as a whole -- I really enjoy the mystery structure and Dickensian melodrama vibes, which provide enough external structure to carry along the plot that the romance arcs can be a little more delicate as a result (I think this is especially true in Unseen Attraction, I really appreciate that the romance arc is not meet --> get together but get together --> forge a sustainable partnership.)

(no subject)

Date: 2020-06-25 04:49 am (UTC)
skygiants: Duck from Princess Tutu sticking her head out a window to look at Rue (no one is alone)
From: [personal profile] skygiants
Yeah, that's pretty much what I mean -- when the romance arc is carrying the whole plot along with it without much else to anchor the story on, then it feels a little more (to me) like it's harder to move away from the standard beats: here's the meet-cute, here's the 'oh no I love him,' here's the Big Fight, here's the climactic reconciliation, and the rising and falling action is all completely tied to the build of the relationship. Whereas I feel like when the romance has a strong external plot to wind itself around, it can take more risks, it can follow unusual emotional arcs, it kind of doesn't need to be so strictly structured in and of itself.

(no subject)

Date: 2020-06-25 04:34 pm (UTC)
oracne: turtle (Default)
From: [personal profile] oracne
This. I agree. Also, having an outside plot gives more opportunity to demonstrate the characters in ways not necessarily relating to their partner. I want to know who they are both inside and outside the relationship.

(no subject)

Date: 2020-06-25 01:58 am (UTC)
eirias: (Default)
From: [personal profile] eirias
I did a double take at the Jedi Mind Tricks reference, having momentarily forgotten we had that mutual acquaintance!

(no subject)

Date: 2020-06-25 09:17 am (UTC)
jb_slasher: enter shikari; common dreads (the only way)
From: [personal profile] jb_slasher
I have nothing interesting to say except that "International Geophysical Year" hit me right in my instrumental music spot. :D

(no subject)

Date: 2020-06-28 06:55 am (UTC)
jb_slasher: enter shikari; common dreads (themata)
From: [personal profile] jb_slasher
Umm, I don't know if it corresponds to that exact description but I also like 65daysofstatic's stuff? :D
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