Weekend stuff

[rowyn]

This 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?

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I had a couple other recommendations but then I realized they were still for kids. 'Cheery' and 'childrens' media' seem to go hand in hand... then again, most of what I watch is kids' stuff. Does anime count? I don't know much about recent anime, but you could watch Slayers or Ranma or Excel Saga or something.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force?

My weekend was fine. I got some writing done. I'm not sure I'm happy with it.

[rowyn]

Yay for getting writing done! \o/

I am beyond the point of requiring happiness with what's written. n_n

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

On the subject of light-hearted movies, how about wacky kung fu movies like Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Hustle? God of Cookery is my favorite there but possibly a bit harder to find.

[rowyn]

*puts the first two on her Netflix queue: as predicted, "God of Cookery" is not available* :)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

They Live:
I agree: This isn't really a horror film. It might, however, be a FRIDGE HORROR film, if you over-think it. ;) The whole concept (magic sunglasses let you see the masterminds who are controlling everyone -- but don't let them know you know!) just seems like the sort of thing I'd expect to hear from some guy shouting expletives every few seconds at the crosswalk on my way to work. Honestly, I was expecting the movie to deliver some gut-punch at the end with the revelation that our protagonist was suffering from paranoid delusions, either alone or with some fellow unstable folks somehow dragged along into his "fantasy," visiting violence upon imagined enemies, all the while imagining themselves the liberators of humanity.

Kind of like how I'm convinced that the true reading of the original Total Recall movie (the Arnie version) is that, yes, Quaid really WAS delusional. No, there WASN'T really a wonderful ALIEN artifact ready and waiting for someone to just press the "go" button to start pumping out a planetwide supply of oxygen to turn it into an Earth-like human-friendly paradise. Quaid's "remembered" girlfriend was in fact a fabrication (as after he gave only a few incredibly vague parameters, somehow an EXACT IMAGE of her appeared on one of the operator's screens before he went into his "adventure"). And so on. The "unreliable narrator" twist is a darker interpretation -- but I think the more compelling one.


Daylight Savings Time:
Oog. It's such a headache. >=( And, boy, such a "great" idea to save energy, except that it just means I spend more time turning on lights in the morning because it's dark out while I'm getting ready to go to work, going to work, and opening up the office.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I think it's silly to switch back and forth, but I like it 'on' a lot better.

Turning it off during the winter when we need it most is just depressing. I don't get to see the sun during the week except for the drive to work, when I'm still zonked out because I'm not a morning person and don't really wake up until noon or so.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah. The funny thing is, my jokey response when people at work complain about Daylight Savings Time is to note how Congress recently decided to EXPAND Daylight Savings Time -- because it's such a good thing that we need MORE of it -- was to say that, hey, if more is good, why not just make Daylight Savings Time YEAR-LONG?!

Or, rather, why not just push for changing standard work hours? Want us all to get up earlier and go home earlier? If it's really going to make things better all around, launch a campaign for standard business hours to operate 8 to 4 instead of 9 to 5 (or whatever, as appropriate), starting with all government run agencies with office hours, and make sure that public transportation schedules shift an hour earlier, etc. That way we don't have to mess with the time zones -- we'd just have a habit of getting up earlier and keeping it that way. Healthy, wealthy and wise, and all that.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

It's easier to make the sun rise at a different time than to convince a million HR departments all over the world to change their standards?

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

...

Yeah, I suppose from a legislative point of view, it probably is. (grumble)

[rowyn]

But don't you set your own hours at work anyway? I thought you could go in earlier if you wanted to.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I could go in earlier. Can't really *leave* earlier. There are meetings and stuff.

[rowyn]

Even though I was pretty sure that wasn't the case, I kept thinking that if I were the protagonist of "They Live", my first thought would be that the glasses were lying to me, rather than that they were revealing the truth. I am unconvinced that "shoot them in the face" is the moral response even if there are aliens living among us, deceiving us, and mooching off our productivity. That solution is too French Revolution for my tastes.

*

On Total Recall: One of my friends said he was disappointed that the remake didn't push the "delusional/this IS your vacation" angle further. I responded with "I thought it made the delusional angle the more probable explanation by far!" And then listed off a bunch of things, like the ridiculous stunts, the way Quaid survives with no significant harm to himself no matter the odds against, the absurdity of the PRIME MINISTER supervising a special ops project IN PERSON, and then running off to lead a war that's being launched through ONE CHOKEPOINT.

... and then realized that all this evidence is SOP for what Hollywood expects us to accept as the world of a film. XD

Actually, the best example of "this can't be real" is that the orientation of the tunnel shuttle is the same coming up as it was coming down. Specifically, things like the walkways on the outside are oriented "up" level to England, and then still "up" when it emerges in Australia. Quaid lands on the roof of the shuttle in England, and his vehicle is still on the roof in Australia. While we see the interiors of the cabins flip when it passes the core, it's pretty clear the whole shuttle is not doing a 180. But result at the end suggests it does. Just the kind of thing that a dream wouldn't necessarily account for!

*

I think Daylight Savings Time must be proof of the power of inertia. Everybody hates it but we keep doing it anyway. x_x

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I am unconvinced that "shoot them in the face" is the moral response even if there are aliens living among us, deceiving us, and mooching off our productivity. That solution is too French Revolution for my tastes.

Same here. I can think of quite a few stories where the hero's response seems a few degrees too far in terms of escalation compared to the evils of whatever the "villains" did. (I am particularly thinking of literature apparently intended for children, where we can't have anything TOO HORRIBLE for little minds, so this has the effect of greatly watering down the offenses of the monsters ... and yet the sapient monsters are still to be obliterated out of existence -- even if it's done in a bloodless manner.)


... and then realized that all this evidence is SOP for what Hollywood expects us to accept as the world of a film.

Exactly! You know, this seems to be the very problem I have when trying to subtly hint to players in an RPG that "This can't be real." The trouble is, the "reality" in an RPG setting is generally several stages removed from REALITY already, so it's very hard to be SUBTLE when trying to make a distinction like that ("This must be a delusion! Look at all these details that are wrong!"), and still get the point across ("Uhm, it could just be that the GM is a goof and forgot about those details until we mentioned them just now....").

But really ... the more I think about the Total Recall reboot, the more pointlessly absurd it strikes me as. I mean, seriously ... we have a global catastrophe, and we end up with the only two habitable places being on opposite poles on the planet, and we decide that the easiest way to get from Point A to Point B is to make a hole through our still-in-motion LIQUID IRON CORE to get there? I ... I don't even know where to start. It just strikes me as pointlessly ludicrous -- and the problem is that this is part of the established reality BEFORE our hero gets his fantasy trip, so I can't just write it off as "Proof he was dreaming!" the way I could various absurd details during Quaid's journey to Mars in the original.

And the other thing: There are so many radical alterations that didn't really make the movie any more fun, and CERTAINLY didn't make it the least bit closer to the original story ("We Can Remember It For You Wholesale") ... and what elements *DO* they keep? (Girl with three ... somethings. Because THAT is critical to the story, obviously. Classy.)



I think Daylight Savings Time must be proof of the power of inertia. Everybody hates it but we keep doing it anyway. x_x

That used to be my theory, until Congress EXPANDED it (which required some actual effort). Grr. (Quick Google check: It was in 2005. Wow. That was a WHILE ago. For some reason I thought it was more recent.)