ase

Late to the party:

Wonder Woman 1984: excellent evocation of the time period, except for the scenes in the metro, which were not scrubbed in post at all. Those LED screens didn't exist until the 2000's and the Silver Line until the 2010's.

I guess there was some other stuff that happened? Nice incorporation of the invisible jet from prior canon, downgrade for making Barbara and Diana fight, major downgrade for making Barbara an actual cat woman, some points restored for Barbara and Diana sort of maybe being friends. The movie really downplayed the ethical sketchiness of Diana's boyfriend being dropped into someone else's body, which I think could've been played up as a hint the Dreamstone was Not Good News.

And I guess that was a Bruce Wayne cameo at the end? My interest in the greater DC-verse stops right were Wonder Woman does, so I could be wrong.

Dune 2021: Read the book, still haven't seen the prior adaptations. I have certainly head about them though. Despite some heroic acting efforts from the cast, my lukewarm caring about everything except the ecological and anthropological bits (or, Deserts, And How The Fremen Survive Theirs) cooling further. Also, let's look at my post movie insta-reaction: "But why genderflip just Liet-Kynes? Why not flip, IDK, Gurney Halleck too?" Reflects on Dune Messiah "Yes. Genderflip Gurney Halleck."

Babylon 5 rewatch: after not getting myself in sync with

selenak's rewatch, I hassled a Discord buddy into watching S2 and on with me. The optimism and naivete of the '90s! The awkward romances! Watching "Confessions and Lamentations" in 2022! (As I type this, once again I am disappointed we didn't get more Crusade. Anyway.) Surely we would never- nope, it's 2022, we would and did and have and will be... human.

Movies:

Checked off "see latest Disney movie" with Redbox and Frozen. It was cute, but I would have liked this a lot more at a different point in my life, or with small children for movie night company. Or maybe if I hadn't heard "Let It Go" a few dozen times first. Idina Menzel is to be saluted for making what I hope is a pile of cash on the royalties.

I wasn't particularly attached to the idea of seeing Captain America: the Winter Soldier in theaters, but found myself compelled by the tumblr gifsets to see it in time to catch up with people's reactions. It had a predictable concentration of explosions and, as noted by some reviewers, a remarkable lack of Winter Solider, given the title. It'll be interesting to see how the changes in the film rebound in Age of Ultron, next summer.

X-Men: Days of Future Past has not crossed my path. Yet. There's a matinee on this weekend's to-do list.

TV:

The Elementary S2 finale was satisfactory, in an OH SHERLOCK HOLMES NO and "Joan Watson, still the functional adult" way; the B5 rewatch is paused at "Phoenix Rising". A decade-plus later, I hate Byron even more. He's bad decision boy, all the time! Because clearly Nonviolence Is The Answer Except For Invasive Scans of Nontelepaths Because I Have Angry Feels is a consistent moral position. (And that's why, even though the telepath arc is a hot mess, and Garibaldi's mid-S5 arc makes me want to shake the man sober, I am totally willing to buy he'd fall off the wagon so very hard.) At this point, Byron is my third-favorite villain in the universe (after Bester and Morden).

In more recent franchises, I watched episode 1x18 of Agents of SHIELD, a mid-arc episode with Coulson also having a Feelings Day, and yet somehow not leading his people to a fiery death (barely)AofS is a poignant reminder that B5 didn't hit its stride until S2. So I may come back to it sometime later. (To everyone who suffered Ward before the spoiler: I feel for you.) There's miscellaneous additional shows in the queue (cough, The Wire, cough) which are of sufficient reputation to jump the queue.

Crossposts: http://ase.livejournal.com/642847.html

To stave off the worst effects of unemployment, I picked up a part time job with one of the car-sharing organizations operating in San Francisco. It's good skills-expanding experience for me, with useful fringe benefits, but being on my feet for hours and days in a row is grueling. This afternoon featured the reappearance of the Thursday slump that suggests I need to better pace myself.

I'm still interviewing for full time positions. Job searching and networking in California has given me a new and personal appreciation of what 12% unemployment means. Sometimes I try to imagine what, say, a room with 25 people would look like if 88% of the room was working, but then I factor in the long-term unemployed, dependents, PT-seeking-FT, and others who don't fit the basic "recent FT seeks FT", and that room looks awfully crowded with anxious people. I've been putting off contacting labs about volunteer work, but I've been on the market for three months, and it's time to consider the value of focusing on resumes and midday networking events while my lab skills rust.

SF Pride is this weekend: I volunteered to be a safety monitor at the Sunday parade. This will either be awesome or I will get awesome stories from the experience.

San Francisco has finally decided it's summer, and is enjoying a spate of cloudy, windy days with highs in the 60's. No heat index to ruin my day!

In the middle of a discussion of the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies, Roommate Number Three mentioned this awesome 90's TV show he had on DVD, and we spontaneously geeked out over Babylon 5. There is a serious problem with the current household configuration: the overlapping interests mean everyone gets along too well. If we don't get the random socializing under control, no one in this house is going to get enough sleep ever again.

Current Mood: relaxed

I am trying to finish dad's Deep Space Nine DVDs before making a play for his dSLR, but I faded a bit in early season seven. Apparently I saw more late-run DS9 than I thought, or absorbed several episode summaries. So I popped out an episode with a mad Vorta and Another Ferengi Trading Scheme, and popped Babylon 5 S2 in. The special effects are painful. The sets are just fine on a 19" screen, but some of the secondary and tertiary acting is pretty wooden. However, the plots are awesome. Also, Delenn gets lines like, "the universe puts us in the right place at the right time," and Mira Furlan delivers them. And I saw all this during its first run, which made a huge difference.

The original Babylon 5 TV movie / pilot aired in Feburary of 1992, and the last episode of the series aired right before Thanksgiving in 1998, nicely bridging my elementary, middle and high school years and all events thereunto. ( Okay, this got long. )

This was supposed to be an entry about other stuff - days left to Chicago, list of activities I've been postponing, me and The Millionaire Next Door (or, why I will never be fat enough) - but obviously I am having a massive old school kick this month. Watching old B5 episodes explains a lot about how I approach fiction and television.

By the way, by 11:30 PM tomorrow, I will have been on vacation for five and one-half hours. I cannot wait.

Current Mood: nostalgic

One good thing to come out of last week was my imagination throwing up the image of a Singularity novel written by Octavia Butler. It would not be told by the victors, or the new elite. It would be told by the people whose bodies and minds were altered, not always by their own desire, and the patterns of oppression and community-building in a future strange and even alien to the reader. And it would be really freaking cool.

On a related note, I don't know if the producers intended Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles to be parsed as a story about parenting and how you can change the future, but I know how I'm reading it. (The machines think you can change the future. The information coming from the future changes the future. The constraints of network TV make it unlikely the series will end with a world-destroying bang. The world has already changed: Skynet is a chess program on steroids; Miles Dyson is dead, long live Skynet; Sarah Connor is not played by Linda Hamilton.) It's unusual to watch a show about some guy named John in an almost completely non-ironic and unapologetic fashion. (Babylon 5, season 5: let's just pretend the whole Byron arc never happened.)

In personal news, when I'm sleep-deprived and underfed I'm really dumb. This is why I'll be at work at 8 AM today instead of 7:30, but now that I've found my wallet (dropped in complete illogic next to the umbrellas, instead of anywhere near eye level) I get to go to work, yay.

Current Mood: awake

While I'm waiting for Photoshop to recover from a resize command gone horribly awry...

B5, S5, eps 1 - 4. The season we almost didn't get. ( Irrelevent, irrereverent commentary. Implied and direct spoilers for all eps possible. )

Did the "interests" meme, but there's no real reason to post it, there's no surprises, except perhaps that "chocolate" earned only an "8." Contrast with "books", which hit the low 30's. The other results are either stuff that's there in another form ("books" - "bujold" - "fantasy") or not on there for good reason ("writing" - because I don't -"sushi" - something I'm getting used to very slowly, despite several encounters with truly excellent samples - "polyamory"- next to the Amoeba, but not engulfed by it).

Current Mood: hungry
Current Music: Bee Gees: Stayin' Alive

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