Reading

WorldCon has Loaded (ISH)

They seem to have fixed the technical issues (*knocks on wood, scratches a stay, turns around three times*) and I have gone to several panels! Both a virtual one of Nigerian authors and a filmed one of an in-person panel.

ETA: Both 10:30 panels I want to see either not streaming or not with sound.

ETA2: Caught the back half of one 10:30 panel (idk if the other one ever worked), and the sound was back for most of the noon panel, though it dropped out completely ten minutes from the end. Folks attending have been amazing with posting running notes to the discord, linking to works mentioned by the panellists.

WorldCon 404 Not Found

So technical issues have taken out the Seattle WorldCon streaming platform, all recorded panels didn't get recorded, and no streaming panels are currently being broadcast. (Apparently some of the earlier streams happened? I missed them.)

The first half a day just got wiped out.

So glad they committed to expanding the virtual experience due to people not being able to attend for Politics reasons. It's off to a flying start.

ETA: It did start working about half way through the fourth panel slot.

ETA2: Panel slot five has video but not sound.

ETA3: No audible sound on the Martha Wells q&a. Giving up for the day.

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fandom: marvel

FF:FS timeline thoughts.

Not sure if anyone else here is into this movie. I'm picking away at the sex pollen fic, but I haven't written fic in long enough that it was slow going the first few days, and now I'm afk while visiting my parents (elder millennial has not warmed to writing fic on phone). Meanwhile, I'm trying to work out the latest backstory.

It's been long enough since I read any F4 comics that I read the wiki to remember the origin story (since the movie just summarises it). The following is a vague stab at a timeline?

( No real spoilers )

Thoughts? Corrections? Anyone just want to talk about the movie?

Current Mood: excited

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Upcoming media things!

Three unrelated things that have been announced recently:

K.B. Spangler says that the sixth Rachel Peng novel is coming out in late October!
Discotek has announced that they're releasing Monster: The Complete Series, which is very exciting since AFAIK only the first chunk was ever released in a physical edition the first time it was licensed. (I think the whole series is on Netflix, but I want to own a copy.)
ANN reports that Minekura-sensei is not only resuming Wild Adapter after a nine-year hiatus but aiming to wrap it up in its eighth volume. If it's actually completed, I imagine that increases the odds of it being re-licensed in English. (I was more attached to Saiyuki, personally, but even though she resumed that last fall [and ANY of this is pretty miraculous, given my vague understanding of her health], I'm not even hoping for anything on that front. If I'm pleasantly surprised, that'll be awesome.)

(Not an announcement, but FYI for fellow Canadians, Z1L's Dongji Rescue has made it to the Cineplex site with the expected August 22nd date. That's...that's next Friday! Less than two weeks! At some point, there should be actual theatres and showtimes! *_*)

Current Mood: groggy

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weekly proof of life

Weekly proof of life: reading + foodstuffs

Reading:

scruloose and I finished listening to All Systems Red and are now maybe a third of the way into Artificial Condition.

Yesterday I finished The Hands of the Emperor, which I think I read some of every day and still took me something like a week and a half even though I continued to really enjoy it all the way through. (I did find myself wishing that some of the emotional arc with Kip and his family had been shorter; [ROT13] uvf pbzcyvpngrq srryvatf nobhg uvf snzvyl abg ng nyy tenfcvat jub ur jnf be jung ur npghnyyl qvq jrer inyvq, ohg gung jnf n YBG bs cntrf qribgrq gb znal vafgnaprf va n ebj bs ehaavat vagb lrg nabgure crefba jub qvqa'g trg vg naq jnf qvfzvffvir be vafhygvat, be fbzrbar jub QVQ xabj jub ur jnf naq univat na vagrenpgvba, naq va rvgure pnfr gurer jnf gura lrg nabgure yratgul qryvirel bs rkcynangvba, naq vg jnf whfg...n ybg.

After finishing that last night, I completely at random started reading We'll Prescribe You a Cat (Syou Ishida), about which I have no particular feelings at this time.

Eating/baking: ( fruit, baking, salad (HelloFresh), sadness about still not liking tomatoes )

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fandom: marvel

Just a thought...

Ben + Johnny + Sex Pollen = fic.

Which, surprisingly, I haven't seen in any version, though it's probably on LJ or something.

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fandom: marvel

Mucca & The Marvel Cinematic Universe

As a follow up to bitching about this in the last post, I thought I'd look and see where I was with watching some of these. The movies are in order they came out. The TV shows are sorta just stuck in there for the year they started, rather than breaking them up by season. I'm too lazy to look up the details of exactly when they aired (especially as I don't even remember some of these existed). I'm only including live action films and tv shows. ( Long list is long )

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Superhero Summer of 2025

Going to the Movies!

(Success Rate: 1.5 out of 4)

In May, we tried to go to Sinners at Local Theatre #1, only to find none of their caption machines were working.

In June, we didn't bother trying.

In July, we tried to go to Superman at Local Theatre #2, only to find that they didn't have caption machines at all. In 2025.

Later in July, while visiting my parents, we went to their Local Theatre to see Superman, only to have multiple caption machines crap out part way through the movie, leaving Nenya to finish it on their speech to text app (an imperfect experience).

This week, I went back to Local Theatre #1 and asked in person if the caption machines were now working (they neither answer the phone, nor call people back if you leave a message). Being assured they were, we booked tickets to The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The first caption machine Nenya got didn't even turn on, but the next one made it through the whole entire movie! Diversity win! (Or something.)

Actual movie thoughts aren't that deep, but it's superhero films, so...

Superman (2025)

So I'm more of a Marvel Girl, though I did like the first Wonder Woman movie and Blue Beetle, but Nenya grew up on the Christopher Reeve movies, and this had been advertised as More Like That, so we decided to give it a go.

It was really fun! I thought the casting was great, and I'm really enjoying the "superheroes' lives are inherently ridiculous" vibe we're currently going with. Also: death to origin stories! It was really nice to see the Justice League International gang (lol), and have a Superman who was doing the Big Blue Boyscout thing in earnest. (I thought

Princess_Weekes' video Quentin Tarantino Accidentally Broke Superman had great insights about why people got on the wrong track with the character.) It was silly and had heart, and didn't have joyless desaturation, and I'm here for all of this.

Will happily come back for the Supergirl movie, and am even more invested in season two of Peacemaker.

The Fantastic Four: The First Steps (2025)

I really liked the retro-futurist aesthetic, and was happy they didn't combine them with 1960s inequalities. Also: space! I haven't seen any of the cast in a whole lot, but thought they were great for the roles. Pascal was fully on point as Reed, and managed to capture his pathos without diving head first into manpain, and I really liked Reed/Sue here. I just like his face, also. They toned down Johnny's womanising into a low-key romance that actually worked for me, though even putting Natasha Lyonne in it didn't make Ben's crush that interesting (mostly because we got 2.5 minutes of time with that plot). Given all the natalism in the air, I'm a bit twitchy about movies focused around babies, but I liked that they didn't even consider that Sue couldn't go on the mission while eight months pregnant. I will riot if we don't get Valeria, though.

Which kind of brings me to the mid-credits scene. ( Spoilers for where this fits in the MCU? )

(Looking at AO3, it seems like people are into ~~Eddie Munson~~ Johnny het, either with the Silver Surfer or with Y/N. Though there is also some team!fic with woobie!Johnny. There's like two Ben/Johnny fic, which is surprising as they had a nice vibe in this, and it used to be the big ship. I'd also like more Reed!whump than I found, but early days.)

Department of "But It's Still Weird that It Happened Twice"

( Mild spoilers for both films )

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Media Round Up: Making Progress on My Pile of Graphic Novels

As the title says I've actually read some of the pile of graphic novels that I got from the library! Things have been busy and I've been sick so progress has still been slow.

The Worst Ronin by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Faith Schaffer — A graphic novel about a teen girl who wants to be a samurai and an older jaded ronin. The tech level is handwavy feudal Japan but with cell phones, which I found distracting. I didn’t think the cell phones added enough to the book to be worth it. Content note: gore, grief and dying

Anzu and the Realm of Darkness by Mai K. Nguyen and Diana Tsai Santos— Graphic novel about a Japanese American girl named Anzu who has just moved to a new town and get accidentally swept into the underworld. I thought it was pushing a little hard on we can solve systematic problems like bullying with individual choices but it was mostly sweet. I liked the kind of cartoony art style and all the different mystical critters.

Dragon of the Lost Sea by Laurence Yep —I read this Chinese mythology inspired MG fantasy novel to the kid at bed time. I had read these books myself as a kid and I was a little worried that they wouldn’t hold up, but the suck fairy has not gotten them! It’s maybe a little weird that the dragons all have wings. Chinese inspired stuff written in English these days tends to be very strict about not mixing in more western elements like that but actually the mixing is fun. Anyways this is a fun adventure story with lots of characters with big personalities.

Navigating With You by Jeremy Whitley,Casio Ribeiro, and Nikki Fox —A graphic novel about two girls who are both new at their high school. They decide to go on a quest to find all 7 volumes of an out of print manga they both never finished reading. I loved this! Both girls are charming and quirky in a geeky way, the manga story within the story was lovely. One of them does have a dead mom, something I generally avoid but by the time that was revealed I was hooked. It was super fun and charming!

Himawari House by Harmony Becker —A graphic novel about three young women from different places who move to Japan and end up living in the same house. It's a very slice of life with lots of food and friendship but also some sad moments. The author has a heartfelt note at the end explaining that she wrote on the accents because she wants to destigmatise having an accent. I have mixed feelings about it though because I find written accents way harder to parse than spoken accents.

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fandom: other tv

Are all in the North. It's Grim Up North.

I've been knitting and watching shows, which has led me to try to find stuff that's good to watch while crafting, especially things on Kanopy.

I was going to do a bunch of these in a post, but the first got long, so stand by for further knitting show thoughts.

North and South (2004)

(I haven't read the book, though I keep meaning to get into Elizabeth Gaskell, who is recommended when you run out of George Eliot.)

A star crossed romance between Daniela Denby-Ashe as an impoverished daughter of an auto-defrocked churchman from Hampshire, and Richard Armitage as a self-made cotton mill owner in ~~Lancashire~~ "Darkshire"* (amazing name, thank you, Mrs Gaskell). He's in the middle of putting down a strike, and she's in the middle of being appalled by the violence of literally everything that's happening. The main attachment between them seems to be that they are both stunningly beautiful, and appear even more attractive when they are sad. Which they are a lot.

So... he's a strike-breaking mill owner in 1855, who sets the army on his workers? (Which they are careful not to show in detail because it might distract us from how very beautiful Richard Armitage is when he's sad.) Absolutely no one talks about where all the cotton's coming from, other than "America."† He does, later in the show, come to be more sympathetic to the workers, and start actually talking to them and shit, but the strikebreaking is a lot to get past. If you're likely to spend much of the show humming "The Internationale," then maybe give this a skip. If you don't mind/can ignore that, the pining is excellent, and the actors are very beautiful.

Quality as knitting show: 4/5, would knit to this again.

( End Notes )

Current Mood: worried

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Nobody needs a drought, but here we are

The entire province is in a drought now, after a generally dry season that was already extremely dry in a lot of areas, and last I heard there was no rain in the forecast. Yesterday official word came out asking people to try to conserve water and telling everyone to stay the hell out of the woods. (Apparently there's a substantial fine, although my understanding is that no such fine has ever been successfully enforced, so that's...great.) So now is the time of hoping the farmers and crops come through as well as possible, and that wildfire season passes us by.

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challengers

Works and Recs (Challengers again)

I keep meaning to write on here more and then -- not -- I'm doing pretty well in a personal if not global/ existential sense. Job is fine, I'm reading and watching interesting things, spending time with friends, watching a lot of tennis because it turns out if you want to watch this sport it is pretty much all going on. The sounds are soothing, the people are attractive, and the social media and journalism are very good about the narratives.

Also, I'm reading and writing about fictional tennis, leading to a couple recs:

A person who might be anonymous or might be a user named 'Buries' recorded a podfic, never be lonely anymore of one of my more fun loving Challengers fics, and it's fun to hear these characters in what I think might be an Australian accent.

I participated in the Challengers summer fic exchange and received Epilogue after Epilogue, by MostReverent (who is great and also ran the exchange). This is a great, chewy Tashi POV where the three of them take a road trip together. Get three people with sexual tension in a vehicle and I am there for it. I've been craving road trip fic with these characters and the author does an amazing job of digging into their feelings after the events of the film. Also, I learned from the title that Dave Malloy wrote and recorded an epilogue to my favorite musical, "Natasha Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812." Pretty sure the author had no way to know I dig that show. Here's the the song which wasn't in the show and didn't appear on the cast album.

Finally, I wrote my own story for the exchange, which is also about the trio post movie:

the music of your broken window (4028 words) by likeadeuce
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Challengers (Movie 2024)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Art Donaldson/Tashi Donaldson/Patrick Zweig
Characters: Art Donaldson, Tashi Donaldson, Patrick Zweig
Additional Tags: Tennis, Negotiations, Art Donaldson's POV, US Open 2019, optimism (Mostly), Post-Canon, Polyamory, The negotiations are not about the polyamory
Summary:

Since the New Rochelle Challenger, Art has been enjoying a kind of summer camp/ adult slumber party with his wife and his oldest friend, but it can't last forever. Can they plan a way forward, or will they always be caught in the wreckage of their teenage relationship crash?

I'm just continuing to have a good time playing with these toys.

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Weekly proof of life: mainly media intake

We didn't decide before going to bed last night whether we'd get up and head straight for the market (not helped by going to bed at different times), and before getting up we halfheartedly opted against it so as not to be rushing around. (This was influenced by knowing that

scruloose won't be at work next week and will almost certainly have to grab a car and go acquire odds and ends for the household project, which means swinging by local-produce places will be easier than usual.) Naturally, now I'm having regrets. But hopefully sometime this week I'll get my hands on my first peaches of the season.

Reading:

scruloose and I are soooo close to done with the audiobook of All Systems Red (which is good, since it's due tomorrow). We listened to chunks of it over supper for the last couple of nights, but their regular Friday-night video chat meant we had a cutoff time last night, so we still have about half an hour left. (Potentially dangerous, this realization that we can maybe listen to audiobooks while eating if the meal isn't "TVable", as I say.) We have Artificial Condition checked out now, too; I remembered to snag it before the month ended (since Hoopla seems to only allow five loans a month? Or does that depend on its deal with specific library systems?).

As for fiction in print, I finished E.K. Johnston's Sky on Fire, which is not set nearly as far after Aetherbound as I initially thought, but also smoothly wove in reminders to key my memory of how that book played out, so all was well. I really enjoyed this. ^_^

Then I read The Butcher of the Forest, which was my first Premee Mohamed work. As with most novellas, it didn't sink its hooks into me, but I liked it and get the feeling I may do well with her novels.

And now I'm reading my first Victoria Goddard book, The Hands of the Emperor, which is a TOME (I think the print edition is 900 pages) but a pretty quick read; I think I'm approaching halfway through? Really enjoying this, too.

On the non-fiction side, I'm leafing through The Afrominimalist's Guide to Living with Less (Christine Platt), which I picked up on a whim at some point. Not very far into it yet, I don't think. (Really what I should do is figure out which decluttering book I read years ago that resonated with me and reread that in hopes of having the same feeling from it and maybe actually taking action this time. It's genuinely awkward that

scruloose and I both tend to hang onto things too much but for completely different reasons. ^^;)

Watching: I think we're three episodes into The Summer Hikaru Died now? (I think episode 5 comes out today?) Creepy and weird. I'm not sure I'm bonding, but I'm interested.

Reading for Lughnasadh

Reading from

thewitchoftheforest.

1. What needs harvesting in my life?
The Fool

2. What is blooming and coming to fruition?
Six of Wands

3. What needs more time to grow?
King of Discs

4. How can I nurture myself now?
Seven of Swords

5. Ways my harvest will help others.
The Devil

I love the idea of the Fool as a harvest, and the Devil as helping others.

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Inexplicably August (hope of a movie | a household project)

I'm not at all clear on how it's August. Time, what is, etc. But word has it that Canada's getting Z1L's Dongji Rescue this month, so that's something to look forward to--assuming we get local showtimes. (I'm haunting the Cineplex site.) Having gotten to see both Lost in the Stars and Land of Broken Hearts in theatres makes me optimistic about this one being my third in-theatre experience since covid arrived.

(We won't dwell on not having gotten Long-ge's Only the River Flows, which I still haven't seen. >.< It seemed like that one mainly/only got film fest sorts of releases. In theory it's had an official English-subbed DVD release, but Amazon has three different listings, all from third-party sources, and I'm not at all sure which, if any, is the legit one.)

scruloose is taking a bit of vacation time to try to get a long-delayed household project done. The clowder won't enjoy the upheaval, and neither will I, but it needs doing (and I was the one who was like, "Hey, were you still thinking of taking time off for that this year?", so I have no one to blame but myself).

And now a three-day weekend. I don't know if I'll be able to get my next rewrite fully polished and turned in, but at least I'm going into the weekend with a draft of it, so I should be able to read and maybe start in on the next rewrite.