retrofit

It's 'cuz I think your (content/stories/commentary/etc) is cool. No expectation of, or pressure for, reciprocal access. by default, I'm granting access to anyone I'm subscribing to; plan to use filters for stuff I want to keep under the radar (if any).

I was retrofit88 on LJ.

Buying a house, having a kidney stone, and starting a new semester - three great tastes that are... well, actually working out surprisingly well, considering. At some point the stone's gonna make a reappearance, pain-wise, at an inopportune time, but 'til then...

...I mean, I don't -think- you're supposed to find an interesting person and scroll through their posts in reverse chron order, for hundreds of pages.

But I do.

It's seriously fascinating. With high-volume users, it's like a very weird kind of access to their stream of consciousness. With lower-volume people, it's like time-travel. And then you see a post reblogged from some new person who's interesting in a whole -new- way, and it's almost like the way browsing Wikipedia or TVTropes forks repeatedly into new lands of wonder...

(Also, the way attribution does(n't) work over there fascinates me.)

I don't even have an account, and I think that may be -increasing- my enjoyment of Tumblr?

Just finished dinner. Sincerely wish I had got more of the hot millet casserole-y thing and less of the veggie lasagna from the coop. The lasagna had too much cheese on top. And the millet (with tomatoes and onions and cauliflower and lemon-y-ish flavors) was very good. Teach me to hedge my bets on new dishes.

I'm thinking a lot about food this week, because I have somehow ended up riding about 65 miles since Monday, just getting around town (abt 25 miles more than my usual weekly commute). Also spent the whole day walking around on Wednesday, and some other time walking today. Hence, I have been eating a -lot- of food this week. Which makes me happy.

Been working hard in the last few years to decouple weight, exercise and food. Mostly feel like I'm making progress. Don't know what I weigh most of the time; don't care (except every once in a while, when I do.) The last few days, I've been wanting to check my weight, because surely all this work = weight loss. BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT, SELF! The point is riding my bike is fun! And convenient, because god parking is stupid. And I love how strong my legs are right now. And I love eating all the great different foods I've tried this week. And all the mental and physical energy I have, when I'm expending a lot of physical energy every day.

But dang, those old thought patterns are deeply ingrained.

I'm so enjoying other people's increased posting lately, that even though I have never been much for posting at all, I decided to give it a go.

Biggest recent news in my life: considering buying a house. JEEZ, THIS IS WEIRD. Like, looking inside other people's houses is weird to begin with, but then thinking about -owning one myself- is also weird. If things break, I will have to pay to fix it! Yikes!

But on the other hand, no upstairs-neighbor doing stompy exercise routine at 6 am, or literally always failing to clean the dryer lint screen and thus burning us both up in our sleep someday...

No waiting around for the landlord to mow the lawn or shovel the sidewalk... because that will be my job. YIKES AGAIN!

Anyway. I'm also fascinated by how much money people are willing to give me, and how much people say I can "afford" and then when I do the math BOY HOWDY HOW I DO NOT WANT TO BE SPENDING THAT MUCH MONEY ON HOUSING. Thankfully, large midwestern city has decent stock of housing at sizes & locations in which I want to live, that also is within the amount of money I am comfortable spending.

So, there's that.

FYI.

Am around reading DW a bit (though as always, in something like bi-weekly chunks.)

Been outta touch for a number of reasons, but chief among them recently was that I had a break-in at my house (while I was away at work, I'm fine) and they stole my netbook. :(

Disappointed to realize that solid-state drives on 9-inch computers are a thing of the past; the few netbooks that exist with solid state drives have craptastic battery life because they made them all little to look almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike macbook airs...

In any case, have acquired new netbook. It is pretty. It came with Windows 7, which I sort of poked at for a few minutes, and then said, "Right then!" and went off to download Ubuntu. My first full install of a Linux operating system. It went pretty smoothly. Though I dunno, this particular flavor may just be too much shiny for me to deal with. May need to go Lubuntu instead.

I have heard good things from the fannish hivemind about Dorothy Sayers' "Lord Peter Wimsey" detective stories for some time. So when I recently discovered the 1970s "Lord Peter" compilation of all the short stories on a book-exchange shelf at a campus library, I picked it up.

I've read almost all of them now. Not terrifically impressed. But that is possibly because it's only the short stories? If you have read the novels, please correct my misimpressions...

1. they feel derivative. When I read older stories that feel derivative, I usually chalk it up to my having read more recent works that are derivative of the older ones. But with these, I know some of their predecessors, both in the "gentleman+valet" genre, and in the mystery genre. The mysteries, in particular, feel a bit predictable; the characters just feel underwritten, and given everything I've heard about them from fannish hivemind, that _has_ to be an artifact of having only read the short stories.

2. they feel like "CSI" - in the ways that caused me to stop watching it. Specifically:

2a. they render murders and their aftermath in grisly detail (text is a lot easier to deal with than CSI's fx shots, but my brain fairly easily perseverates on disturbing images, whether they originated as images outside of my brain, or my brain constructed them as images itself.) The grisliness feels a bit unnecessary, but apparently it is a positive factor for some other folks.

2b. Women seem to appear primarily dead, in peril, or as negative factors in the lives of male characters. There is a contingent of background women who are relatives or otherwise hangers-on of male characters, but they don't do much.

I'd be a lot more okay if, as artifacts of their time, the stories just didn't have a lot of women in them at all. The fairly relentless victimization (often with elements of titillating sexualization or exploitation, how very ahead of her time!) is really creeping me out.

Do the novels do better with any of this stuff? Better characterization? Less exploitative?

I liked Edmund a lot in "Prince Caspian" because he was all scornful and morally upstanding and a pretty kick-ass fighter, but he didn't do anything for me because he was clearly a kid.

So, saw "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" the other day.

Then I had to go look up how old Skandar Keynes is, because I know Edmund is only supposed to be about 16 in that story, but that actor's looking all grown and on-the-older-side-of-edge-of-manhood-ly, and the character is still scornful and upstanding and a kick-ass fighter...

Turns out it's not that shameful, because dude's about nineteen which means he's a legal adult and all. But my repeated train of thought while watching the movie was "wow, it's like they're writing a slash-engendering buddy-cop tv show about Caspian and Edmund right into their (also in many other ways extremely liberal reinterpretation of the plot)!" - and the actor who plays Caspian, Ben Barnes, is like 29, which is definitely campfire-rule territory...

So. Shameful(ish). But, um, any recommendations of good, preferably Dawn-Treader-era, Caspian/Edmund fic would not go amiss?

Whoever's casting the Narnia movies is really pretty awesome (I liked the late-80s/early-90s tv adaptations a lot, too, but these have been even better!) . Georgie Henley has been, in each movie, such a perfectly awesome Lucy. (Aside: I love Georgie Henley's hair - it is so amazingly gorgeous.) The kid they cast as Eustace for this one was a good match. I missed Eddie Izzard's flair for Reepicheep - and was surprised to find out his replacement was Simon Pegg, because I would've expected Pegg to have added his own flair to the character and instead I found him really quite a boring Reep.

In other news about Dawn Treader, I didn't much like a lot of the changes they made to the storyline. I get that the episodic nature of the book doesn't lend itself well to feature-film adaptation, so of course some rearranging and collapsing had to happen. But overall I thought the character-development arcs suffered a lot.

( SPOILERS AHOY, discussion of specific characters' arcs )

As usual, sets and production design out of this world. The dragon was a little underwhelming, especially his face, especially since they've done so well with other expressive CGI creatures... Fight scenes were awesome, costumes gorgeous. Overall, I approve & will probably watch it again. Yes, partly just to indulge my "look at those pretty men" impulses. But also, production design! And also, also, Lucy being awesome. Have they cast Jill Pole for the next one, yet?

Haven't been around in a while; nothing wrong, just not in a terribly fannishly-productive mode. Was reminded talking with craftyreader in another forum how cool fandom people are, and decided to get more interactive again. Probably not in any high-volume way, but hey, HI!

In other news, I texted my mom the other night, and she texted back, "Oh noes!" Meanwhile, on the phone with my dad, he's telling me about a Slashdot thread.
Recognize that I am, at 35, the _youngest_ of three relatively-widely-spaced, not-that-early-in-life children, extrapolate my parents' ages, and giggle along with me at our nerdiness. :)