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Media
Watching: Leonard and I finished Avatar: The Last Airbender. What a fun show! Engaging, though uneven. I could really see how its level of seriousness paved the way for other stuff I've enjoyed, like Steven Universe. One thing I like in entertainment is when I can't predict precisely what will happen next, perhaps because the characters move faster than I'd assumed or bypass obvious prevarications. I saw this several times, as when one character explicitly says "This is the part where I double-cross you." And -- sometimes with just a few words -- the show gives real personality to characters, not just secondary or tertiary characters, but characters who only show up in a single scene in a single episode.
Leonard and I have just started rewatching Legend of Korra to get the additional layer of resonances (this is amazingly rare -- Leonard is extremely unlikely to rewatch or reread things).
And it's useful for me to have a thing to watch that Leonard doesn't particularly want to, so I can look at moving pictures without feeling like I'm leaving him out, so I am in bits and bobs watching the 1993 Tales of the City series which I don't know whether I ever watched entire. There's something like a fourth series out now, including a tense scene about generational conflict that I saw via social media several months ago. But I don't know whether I'll get all the way there ... I like seeing San Francisco, which I miss, but I'll have to see whether I like the soapiness and the Issue plots.
Playing: I heard good things about Spiritfarer, and we picked it up, but GOSH there's a lot of crafting and dependency management and stuff in the first hour+ rather than the bit where you counsel dying people and help them get to the gate. Leonard explained that this is basically a tutorial stage. I imagine we'll play it some more and see what happens when this tutorial stuff is over. My feelings here are kind of like how I prefer "Once Upon A Time" and "Snake Oil" to board/card games with a bunch of points and numbers mechanics. More making stories up with my friends, less secretarial/project management work.
Reading: some comfort rereading (many bits of China Mountain Zhang, all of Ancillary Justice, some of The Dispossessed), a bunch of short fiction from past and current sf/f magazines (see my Pinboard tags for recommendations, plus recent MetaFilter posts), and I've started Philip K. Dick's Gather Yourselves Together which is a little unpleasant so far because one of the three main characters is a somewhat unpleasant dude.
I realized that I have NOT completed all of Zen Cho's fiction, because she has a short story ("Hikayat Sri Bujang, or, The Tale of the Naga Sage") in The Book of Dragons which came out last month. Waiting now for the ebook to become available from my local library, because $17 for an ebook or $30+ for a paper book when I am only keen on a few of the authors featured is more than I want to spend right now. Although I may change my mind if I'm like "but I want it nooooooow".
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And on watching Korra repeatedly (which my kid and I are doing now) I have developed a deep love for Tenzin and for both of Toph's daughters. I wish the show could have been explicit about Korra and Asami's relationship, though the comics that follow the show absolutely do go there, showing their first kiss and Korra bringing Asami home to her parents and so on. And I've heard people argue that Korra walked so that Steven Universe and She-Ra could fly, on the queer representation front.
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Korra is an amazing contrast to Aang in that, as Leonard points out, she is amazingly confident. At least at first.
Iroh!!!! A loving and competent adult!!!!
Avatar and The Good Place are both amazingly ambitious on the level of philosophical questions they're willing to tackle, and so both of them back off unsatisfyingly or fizzle in a few ways that are only unsatisfying because they're asking questions that humans have been trying to answer for as long as we've been alive or in complex societies.
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I do like the fishing mechanic an awful lot more than Stardew Valley's...
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The fishing is fun! I also like it when I can check someone's mood, figure out that they are hungry, and give them some food they like.
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Hope you enjoy!
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