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Weekend stuff
Mar. 10th, 2014 12:52 pmThis weekend, Lut and I watched "They Live", a 1988 sf/action* film. Lut uses a line from it now and again -- "I'm here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum" -- which is what prompted me to put it on the Netflix queue. It is a decidedly 80s B-movie, though the socio-economic commentary would be right at home with the Occupy Wall Street movement. In fact, the idea that the subliminal messages behind all media, signs, and advertising are "Marry and reproduce, obey authority, consume, stay asleep" is pretty reasonable when you think about it. (Granted, not ALL media. But culture is a meme, and that's how it reinforces itself.) That the film's solution to socio-economic imbalances is "shoot the evil bastards in the face" does add to the overall creepiness, though.
* As we started the film, I told Lut all I knew about it was "it's an 80s sf/horror film with aliens living disguised among humans on Earth". Lut: "It's not a horror film." Me: "Oh, I thought I'd heard it was. Hey, it's a John Carpenter film but not horror?" Lut: "It's not horror." Afterwards, as we're looking up one of the actors on IMDB: Me: "Hey, IMDB says it's a horror film too. I knew I'd heard that it was." Lut: "Well, IMDB is wrong." Me: "Yeah, they are. It's not horror."
We also watched a few episodes of season 7 Burn Notice: Grimdark Edition. It's not bad per se, but I miss the more light-hearted episodes of earlier seasons, where the protagonists often were clearly helping innocent people against bad guys. Now it's just a big quagmire of bad guys vs other bad guys and everything sucks. Season 6 was a lot like that too. Lut had "Sin City" on the queue and it arrived, but I'm going to let him watch it alone. We saw it in the theatre already, and I'm over quota on grimdark.
Annoyingly, I've gotten to the grimdark portion of Rational Arrangement in editing too. BAD TIMING. I need some cheery action/sf/fantasy to watch with Lut. Any recommendations? MLP doesn't count. (Lut doesn't like children's media).
I spent a couple of hours reverse-engineering an outline for RA. I wrote an outline when I started, but it diverges wildly from what I actually wrote. (Among other things, I was almost finished writing the outline before I decided I wanted to write a poly romance, so the third protagonist is shoehorned into the outline in a couple of places but largely absent. The character fits far more naturally into the book.) I've been tagging scenes with their relevance to plot, character, and setting. So far, virtually everything is character & setting, and maybe half of it is plot-critical. Some of the stuff that's tagged with "character" is significant in terms of show why the characters love one another and/or why the reader should care, so I don't actually think it's a good idea to cut everything that's not tagged for plot. It is enlightening in showing why the book's so long, though. I am not sure this enlightenment justifies the time it takes me to put it together. I think the reason I feel like I am failing at editing is that I spend a lot of time tweaking the story and doing stuff with it but it doesn't feel measurably different or improved to me. In my head, it's still the same "long romance that I like". Eventually I will get through my list and hopefully then I'll feel as if I accomplished something. Until then: slogging onwards.
I updated my activity log, reconstructing what I could from all the days I didn't track. Yikes. At least it's current now.
On Sunday, I went for a 10-mile bike ride because the weather was lovely. My legs are in fine shape for outdoors biking, since I've been using the exercise bike all winter. My sit bones, however, are not prepared. This was not noticeable on Sunday, but when I got back in the saddle to bike to work today: ow. It doesn't bother me any time except when I'm riding, at least. On the exercise & diet front: I have managed to average under 1500 calories per day for two weeks now. Yay! I have not, of course, lost any weight. -_- Surely that will change eventually.
I wrote one dragon bio -- I have slacked off on those and am trying to make editing progress instead. I don't know if the trade-off is working.
I have a little under two weeks before the Wind festival kicks off. I should post a round of donation-begging on the items-wanted board and see if we can get anything from the site at large.
In other news: Daylight Savings Time still sucks.
Everybody else have a good weekend?
* As we started the film, I told Lut all I knew about it was "it's an 80s sf/horror film with aliens living disguised among humans on Earth". Lut: "It's not a horror film." Me: "Oh, I thought I'd heard it was. Hey, it's a John Carpenter film but not horror?" Lut: "It's not horror." Afterwards, as we're looking up one of the actors on IMDB: Me: "Hey, IMDB says it's a horror film too. I knew I'd heard that it was." Lut: "Well, IMDB is wrong." Me: "Yeah, they are. It's not horror."
We also watched a few episodes of season 7 Burn Notice: Grimdark Edition. It's not bad per se, but I miss the more light-hearted episodes of earlier seasons, where the protagonists often were clearly helping innocent people against bad guys. Now it's just a big quagmire of bad guys vs other bad guys and everything sucks. Season 6 was a lot like that too. Lut had "Sin City" on the queue and it arrived, but I'm going to let him watch it alone. We saw it in the theatre already, and I'm over quota on grimdark.
Annoyingly, I've gotten to the grimdark portion of Rational Arrangement in editing too. BAD TIMING. I need some cheery action/sf/fantasy to watch with Lut. Any recommendations? MLP doesn't count. (Lut doesn't like children's media).
I spent a couple of hours reverse-engineering an outline for RA. I wrote an outline when I started, but it diverges wildly from what I actually wrote. (Among other things, I was almost finished writing the outline before I decided I wanted to write a poly romance, so the third protagonist is shoehorned into the outline in a couple of places but largely absent. The character fits far more naturally into the book.) I've been tagging scenes with their relevance to plot, character, and setting. So far, virtually everything is character & setting, and maybe half of it is plot-critical. Some of the stuff that's tagged with "character" is significant in terms of show why the characters love one another and/or why the reader should care, so I don't actually think it's a good idea to cut everything that's not tagged for plot. It is enlightening in showing why the book's so long, though. I am not sure this enlightenment justifies the time it takes me to put it together. I think the reason I feel like I am failing at editing is that I spend a lot of time tweaking the story and doing stuff with it but it doesn't feel measurably different or improved to me. In my head, it's still the same "long romance that I like". Eventually I will get through my list and hopefully then I'll feel as if I accomplished something. Until then: slogging onwards.
I updated my activity log, reconstructing what I could from all the days I didn't track. Yikes. At least it's current now.
On Sunday, I went for a 10-mile bike ride because the weather was lovely. My legs are in fine shape for outdoors biking, since I've been using the exercise bike all winter. My sit bones, however, are not prepared. This was not noticeable on Sunday, but when I got back in the saddle to bike to work today: ow. It doesn't bother me any time except when I'm riding, at least. On the exercise & diet front: I have managed to average under 1500 calories per day for two weeks now. Yay! I have not, of course, lost any weight. -_- Surely that will change eventually.
I wrote one dragon bio -- I have slacked off on those and am trying to make editing progress instead. I don't know if the trade-off is working.
I have a little under two weeks before the Wind festival kicks off. I should post a round of donation-begging on the items-wanted board and see if we can get anything from the site at large.
In other news: Daylight Savings Time still sucks.
Everybody else have a good weekend?
