Alita: Battle Angel
Feb. 17th, 2019 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
So hey, let me tell you I forgot that 90's anime knew how to do a baby girl power fantasy with a side allegory snarl at authoritarian bullshit and how this sort of social/spiritual/economic set up corrupts and destroys everyone and everything (and before you come @ me about how 'this movie is full of problematic whitewashing HDU enjoy it', check yo'self. The manga was set in post-apocalyptic Kansas with the idea that people from all over fled there, and that's what the movie depicts. Not every anime is Ghost in the Shell, ok? OK.)
( Cut for the not spoilery flailing. )
( Now for the spoilery as hell story stuff )
( Here's an actual warning that is also spoilery. )
I think the reasons why I enjoyed A:BA was less that it's a shot-for-shot adaptation, then it's just that I feel like they raided my memories of the parts that stood out and resonated, or that I loved because sheer cool, and the parts that made me go "....ow my heart" and distilled that and seasoned it and made it better, and the end result is more faithful to the idea than the shot for shot might be. So yeah, I am down with this.
Is it the perfect movie or something? Nah. No such thing. What would that even mean? Would I own it/see it again? Hell yeah. This is a rare live-action adaptation that not only pleased me now, but it went out of its way to jump in a time machine just to make my nineteen-year-old animation-obsessed heart SO HAPPY.
(no subject)
Feb. 17th, 2019 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Miraculous Ladybug
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Marinette Dupain-Cheng & Tikki, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Plagg, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Chloé Bourgeois
Characters: Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Tikki (Miraculous Ladybug), Plagg (Miraculous Ladybug), Chloé Bourgeois
Additional Tags: Episode: s03 Climatika 2 | Stormy Weather 2, sitting these two clowns down to talk about their feelings, Discussion of Extinction
Summary:
"Hey Hawkmoth, Take A Bath Before We're All Extinct (or, Stormy Weather Would Not Have Stopped)"It was Mme. Mendeleiev's fault, really. She liked bringing current events into her lesson plans, and μcat the superhero-science blogger had done a lot of research and a lot of math in the four days after the second go-round with Stormy Weather. Marinette, looking at all the equations and cited sources and clear, concise prose salted with wordplay, wondered if μcat had slept at all in those four days. If she focused on how long it must have taken them to read each article, run each set of numbers, write each paragraph, then she had no attention to spare for the words "extinction event", and needn't think about what it meant here and now. What it implied. What it must have taken to make it not.
—μcat, Schrödinger’s Miraculous: physics in the City of Heroes (may work differently when observed)
(Adrien whisked Aurore out of the classroom the moment he saw the essay title. He then casually leaned on the door frame, blocking Chloé from following. Marinette should have thought of those herself.)
Marinette lasted two more days before she cracked.
(no subject)
Feb. 17th, 2019 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Weight of the 'anti-anxiety' weighted blankets they are now selling in local stores for people my size : 12 lbs
Total weight of my usual winter bedding (flannel sheet, 2 fleece throws, hand-made vintage quilt, Southwestern-style woven cotton blanket or doubled woven wool blanket) : 11.8 lbs.
...oh.
Well, there's another thing to go on the list of "what do you mean, coping mechanism for non-neurotypical people? That's just how we've always done it here!"
Also went to the thrift store for the half-off sale. Bought:
-sealing wax
-mini basketweaving kit
-beading wire
-necklace clasps
-2 yd plaid flannel
-2 small blank sketchbooks
-hedgehog kitchen timer
-steampunk aviator goggles
-'popcorn rocks'
-pack of vintage Crayola
-2 8-oz Coke glasses
-handheld electric bubble maker
-pad of watercolor & charcoal paper
-15 books.
....I need to be kept away from thrift store.
Boskone
Feb. 17th, 2019 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
In addition to filk concerts and singalongs, I went to a lyric writing workshop, a panel on the year in physics and astronomy, and a "name that tune" session on TV and movie music. For the last one, I sat back in the audience rather than joining one of the teams, since my knowledge of that kind of music isn't very deep. However, one part featured classical music used in movies. I got the name and composer for every one of those; the slow movement of Beethoven's 7th symphony took me just one chord to identify. However, I didn't know what movies they were in.
Boskone was fun. It's the only general con that's still on my regular schedule.
Sleep Journal - 190207 - Fairge Anma
Feb. 17th, 2019 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
7 February 2019
Sarah Farris
The fates were not kind. The ground did not rise up to swallow me. ( Read more... )
Done Since 2019-02-10
Feb. 17th, 2019 03:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
There is sadness this week, as NASA's Opportunity Rover Mission on Mars Comes to End. Oppy's last transmission amounted to “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”. Several songs have already been written; I'll almost certainly try to write one of my own. Probably from Oppy's POV; I seem to enjoy anthropomorphizing AIs and other inanimate objects.
Not a whole lot has been getting done this week. I did manage to run some errands Thursday and Friday, with the car on the street. Pulled back into the driveway Friday after things were done, anticipating that the predicted good weather would make it possible to get up again the next time I need to. Fingers crossed.
I started working on the potential writing (tutorials) gig -- we'll see whether $editor likes my proposal. Not many notes Friday and Saturday as a result. Not sure I'm working fast enough. That remains to be seen; it's going slower than I'd like but that may just be because I'm working on the outline.
If you're into music at all, you'll get a kick out of (Gimme Some of That) Ol' Atonal Music - YouTube and Twelve Tones - YouTube (via ysabetwordsmith).
And I was highly amused to find someone seriously advocating the use of RFC 1149, some 18 years after I wrote a song about it.
This Guy Found The Purr-fect Way To Make His Cat Burn Those Extra Calories
Feb. 17th, 2019 01:00 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
All cats get fat and move a little as time goes by. We must somehow gain their interest and make them move more often. A radio-controlled machine can come to our help. If you put your cat's favorite toy in it, he will follow this machine and try to understand how the toy turned out to be there.
Submitted by: (via CatPusic)
Half-Price Sale in Polychrome Heroics
Feb. 17th, 2019 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Step Inside The Cute Hello Kitty Grand Café in California
Feb. 17th, 2019 12:00 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
First there were Hello Kitty café trucks, mini cafés and pop-ups, but now we've got the Grand Café at the Irvine Spectrum Center in Southern California. So step inside and say hello. Via: Catster
Submitted by:
(no subject)
Feb. 17th, 2019 12:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of our own Back Yards, by Sara Stein. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993
‘Noah’s Garden’ was one of the early books advocating using native plants and gardening for the wildlife. Stein relates, in wandering fashion, the long process she and her husband undertook of returning a large site to something sustainable and critter friendly- both macro and micro. She shows the problem with having a lawn instead of a meadow, and with planting exotic (non-native plants) to the exclusion of natives. Not having a landscape that provides food and shelter to native insects, birds, and mammals means that pest species numbers just explode with nothing to keep them in check. And that point is where people end up reaching for the spray gun.
It’s a very interesting book for the most part, although it bogs down near the end and I started skimming for a while. There are sources that go into more detail about meadows, pest species, and gardening for wildlife available now, but it’s a nice starting point. Four stars.
Consumption
Feb. 17th, 2019 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Growth. I went to the allotment today! The fennel died back a lot in the frosts but I'm hopeful that 1. it will continue turning into food (it's putting forth new feathery growth) and 2. some if it will get as far as making seeds. I pulled up all the teasels and got as many of them as I could before the cheap shitty secateurs broke, so those are in a neat pile, and did a very little hand-weeding. Happily, though, the combination of manure + weed-suppressant takeaway pizza boxes + wood chip meant that there was really very little weeding as needed done, which impressed me. Spinach is coming along nicely but probably needs thinning (and eating); to my surprise a nontrivial chunk of the remaining pak choi also survived the frosts and are now doing their determined best to flower.
When I got in on Wednesday night, I discovered that my comfrey crowns had finally arrived (on the second attempt) so I've now got those potted up on the patio to establish while I work out where to put them. This means that I also received the last of the seeds currently on order, though I am now seriously considering acquiring two kinds of basil, some caraway and sesame seed, some rocket, and maaaaybe some chickpeas, though chickpeas seem possibly even a step too far for me.
Alas I did not win the greenhouse I had been pining after, but it ended up going for about three times what I was willing or able to pay for it, which means I successfully do not feel bad about having "just missed out" or similar.
Lab supplies. So many lab supplies. I got to campus at around 9 on Thursday and... slightly didn't leave again til 2pm on Saturday, though hopefully by the next time I want to do anything of the sort I'll have 24h access enabled on my card so I'll be able to actually kip on the sofa in my head of group's office rather than drowzing underneath the computer table in the Bloody Cold. (I was wearing three jumpers, a scarf, and fingerless gloves, and I still spent most of those three days shivering.)