Miles Vorkosigan alternate careers

Jul. 16th, 2025 08:46 am
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


It's not exactly a secret that I hate Miles Vorkosigan being in the military, so for RL reasons I was thinking hmm could Miles instead become a doctor, and then followed up immediately with "absolutely he could not" and in fact I could not think of any position in a hospital that he would be suited for, but then I realized I was overthinking this.

Miles would be a great plumber. It's perfect for him. No boss, just clients, and he can pick the interesting jobs. It's bounded but also a place for creativity. He has to find out what the problem is and fix it. Because of his size, he may even be a better choice for certain jobs than other plumbers. He can pick his hours by picking the clients and the jobs, and then hyperfocus on a problem until it's over. If he wants, he can pack his schedule, or he can relax it. But he's not answering to anyone and people are grateful for his help because it's a problem they can't fix themselves, and it's also necessary: everyone will at some point require the assistance of a plumber.

The only problem is that there's no wonderful recognition and pride from his peers, unless we can get him to value the opinions of other plumbers, and then he can just brag about all the impossible disasters he fixed before breakfast. The sense of accomplishment is built-in, as in the sense of being valuable and needed.

And I feel like even Miles Vorkosigan would not find a way to commit treason whilst doing it.

Two Brief Murderbot thoughts

Jul. 15th, 2025 10:16 pm
muccamukk: Blue sky with aeroplanes trailing red, orange, yellow, green and blue smoke. Text: "Not June. Still Queer." (Misc: Still Queer)
[personal profile] muccamukk
That I haven't seen anyone else mention.

ONE.
I like that they cast an older actor. AS is closing in on 50, and it might be a Hollywood 50, but he looks like he's seen some miles along the road. It makes things hit different than if they'd cast a thirty year old who looked like they just hatched. I know they compressed the timespan in the show, but in the book it'd been something in the range of four years between when it disabled its governor module and the start of All Systems Red, plus however long it'd been enslaved before that, which it doesn't even really remember. Which I think is better represented by someone with some lines around their eyes.

TWO.
Nenya speculated about if they were going to do the later books (and I think they'll do three seasons to cover the first four novellas, combining Artificial Condition and Rogue Protocol into the second season, and then call it a day), and if so, if we'd see the ship from System Collapse. I'd been thinking that, actually, mild spoiler for System Collapse )

Me-and-media update

Jul. 16th, 2025 03:16 pm
china_shop: Close-up of Zhao Yunlan grinning (Default)
[personal profile] china_shop
Previous poll review
In the Companions poll, the emotionally unavailable alley cat and the trivia-obsessed fennec fox came first equal with 42.1% each, followed by the stoic capybara with 35.1%. Hugs won the ticky-boxes with 66.7%, followed by frittered-away time with 38.6%. Thank you for your votes!

Reading
Audio: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, read by Arian Moayed. Full of cultural specificity and lots of wonderful observations about humanity in general, and art, and death. More emotion-driven and theme-driven than plotty. Beautifully written. So good!

Audio: Swordcrossed by Freya Marske, read by Omari Douglas. I just finished this, and oh my goodness, it mashed all my buttons! It's a light, secondary world, urban-historical m/m romance with guild politics and secrets, swordplay and skulduggery, and people being messed up by their rich guild-house families. I hereby declare (for myself, at least) a sub-category of enemies-to-lovers that is "playful-enemies to lovers". You know, when there are compelling reasons not to trust each other, but they like each other enough that they can't help teasing, admiring, and developing inconvenient loyalties, despite the suspicion. (There are tons of other examples, and I would like to read some more of them. In fact, the Guardian drama falls squarely in this category, as does White Collar a lot of the time.) The two leads of Swordcrossed clicked so well -- I laughed out loud at the banter, and again, often, in sheer delight.
Thoughts about depictions of falling in love in fiction.

There was one thing it did particularly well, for the main pairing, that I'm still emotionally and analytically rolling around in. I think it's quite hard to show people falling in love: I've seen it done via one character obsessing about the other's secondary sex characteristics, which I don't find convincing or interesting. Or sometimes an author has a character notice how good-looking the other is, and from that, the reader is supposed to intuit attraction and emotional curiosity/investment -- but it's never quite clear to me if the "good-lookingness" is subjective or objective, and there are plenty of objectively good-looking people that I don't want to even be in the same room as. Other times, what we're shown is physical attraction as a stand-in for emotional connection, followed by kisses and/or sex as a stand-in for a lot of things. (I've done all of these, of course; fandom is particularly rife with all of this because most of the time a fic author and their readers go into the story pre-invested in the ship.) Anyway, in Swordcrossed, Marske teased all these layers out by having the couple acknowledge their attraction and start an intense "casual" thing with an expiry date, semi-independently of catching feelings. The development of loyalties and being on the same side (in cahoots!), and the delicately depicted tenderness, understanding and mutual care were wonderful precisely because they weren't implied just by sexual attraction, and because it was the feelings, not the sex, that disrupted the characters' plans. It was delicious. (Perhaps I just need to read more fuckbuddies-to-lovers, with a side-order of people-in-denial-in-love, lol.)

tl;dr I found the "falling in love" part very satisfying, and it's making me think about how I might be able to do that better in my own writing.
In terms of the audiobook, Douglas's narration was fantastic and very hot for the sex scenes. A++++ (And for people who've already read Swordcrossed, there's an excellent 18k fanfic for a background pairing by [archiveofourown.org profile] marquis, which works as a supplement to fill in some gaps.) (How is there not more than one other fic for this book, though? I went to AO3 expecting a "Red White & Royal Blue"-sized fandom.)

Audio: I'm two chapters into Meditations for Mortals: Four weeks to enhance your limitations and make time for what counts, written and narrated by Oliver Burkeman, and approaching it, as recommended, one chapter per day for now (though I'm not sure my limitations need enhancement).

Ebook: I'm sort of dithering between The Black Cauldron and getting back to Werecockroach, and consequently not reading anything... and now I've opened The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing for a re-read, but not actually started that either. Also, Guardian -- we're in the home stretch.

Paper: Having reached the end of my third and last library loan renewal period, I finally sat down and read No Rules Tonight by Hyun Sook Kim and Ryan Estrada in about two and a half hours. It's a graphic novel about a university traditional-dance club going on an overnight hiking trip in 1980s Korea. The military regime is a constant looming presence, but it's gently funny and sweet as well as eye-opening. I really appreciate how this and Banned Book Club, by the same authors, depict life, friendship, and resistance under authoritarianism. Also, it made me want to try Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving, one of the banned books mentioned.

Btw, does anyone else remember [livejournal.com profile] obsessive24 and her amazing fanvids? Looks like she has a queer fantasy trilogy coming out soon.

Kdramas
I finished My Dearest Nemesis and loved it; an adorable depiction of whole-hearted fannishness and the search for love and acceptance. Am now an episode into First Night with the Duke and still in that "not yet hooked, but willing to be" state of quantum uncertainty. I've also randomly picked up my abandoned rewatch of the Cdrama noona romance, Nothing But Love. (This is a rewatch I started with my late friend J, way back when; he bounced off it because he hated all the male characters.)

Other TV
Finished Murderbot, Poker Face and Étoile, which I enjoyed in that (descending) order.
Just me grumbling about Étoile; please skip if you love it! My deep loathing of Crispin overshadowed a lot of my enjoyment; they kept making him quirky, and I was worried they might try to redeem him. And lo, by the end, Jack was turning to him for advice, wtf??? I don't super enjoy incompetent management (Jack seemed to have no idea what he was doing most of the time; who hired him?) or artistic people being assholes (Tobias, sit down and let the dancers do their jobs!). Mostly, though, my problem was Amy Sherman-Palladino's tendency to let her characters chat endlessly with no story or drive; the party episode was very rambly. I thought she'd got better with Mrs. Maisel, but this was (fittingly, I guess) more like Bunheads, just on a grander scale.

That said, I loved Mishi and Cheyenne's mother, and I liked Geneviève. Cheyenne was funny some of the time, and I enjoyed her sojourn in the cemetery with her mother (despite it literally not going anywhere), and Geneviève's advice to her about The Slip. And I liked Tobias' breakup.

tl;dr: I should have stuck with the gifset.


More Fringe with my sister. The cases of the week are more interesting than the season arc to the point that we both forgot, in a ten-minute break between episodes, that Olivia was kidnapped.

The Secret Genius of Modern Life with Hannah Fry s02e01, which was fun like always, but with disturbing "look how effective surveillance is" undertones.

And a whole bunch of Bluey, the kids' cartoon, which is omg so adorable and funny. I'm not even into kidfic, and I love it!

Guardian/Fandom
Guardian!!! <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Also, [personal profile] mific and I are working on an intentionally Dreamwidth-specific comm for people to post or link to meta discussions about writing. Watch this space.

Audio entertainment
Writing Excuses, random episodes of Letters from an American, Midnight Burger, possibly some other things but I'm having technical problems with Pocket Casts atm. (The app controls are obscured by the phone controls, as if the app thinks my screen is bigger than it is; anyone else having this problem?)

Films
Jurassic World: Rebirth -- this was such silly fun. I'm pretty sure the bad guy was built from a template, but the dinosaurs were wonderful. Favourite part:
spoiler the dozing T-rex -- so tense, yet so funny.


Writing/making things
The glittering ice sculpture of my oomph has become a puddle. Anyway, this was my entry for the Science round of [community profile] fan_flashworks:
Title: Winging It (600 words) [General Audiences]
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Characters: Ya Qing, Lin Jing, Zhao Yunlan, Zhu Hong, Original Yashou character, Da Qing
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Yashou Renewal, Education, A New Era for the SID, Kidfic, Drabble Sequence
Summary: The Crows need a science tutor.

Life/health/mental state things
The weeks are flicking past at a frightening rate. I'm constantly in a state of "is this just my baseline sore throat, or am I coming down with something?" Note to self: that online Harvard course you signed up for? Do it.

Cats
Cure for ongoing minor cat health niggles: book a vet appointment for later in the week. Within two days she was fine, and I cancelled the appointment.

Korean
I randomly listened to a TTMIK episode (the texting vs phonecalls one) and understood maybe 10% of it? That's not nothing. (Aside: Hyunwoo's theory of why young people take phonecalls on speaker is that the young people were all on FaceTime as babies, so they didn't acquire the "hold phone to ear" habit. I was pleased with myself for catching that, then realised he'd reiterated it in English. ;-p)

Food
My sister brought me a packet of Selena Gomez Oreos, for the laughs; I'm pretty sure those were my first oreos ever. (Selena is mildly cinnamon-flavoured, if you were wondering.) | I made lemon honey last week (10/7/25); I always go through a few rounds of buying lemons and not getting started before they go a bit squishy, but in the end, it never takes as long to make as I think it will. | Also made enchiladas, including the sauce, and a no-recipe beef casserole. Yesterday I made pumpkin and kumara soup. I have plans to try lemon chicken (via [personal profile] autodach) and to make no-recipe risotto this week. It's hard to fathom that a few years ago I rarely cooked.

Good things
Sunshine! Audiobooks with great narrators. Kids' cartoons. Ginger in everything. Fandom and Guardian. Writing (*presses face against the shop window*). Washing on the line. Dreamwidth.

Poll #33363 Retribution
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 24


The best revenge

View Answers

is living well
18 (75.0%)

is sweet
3 (12.5%)

is served cold
3 (12.5%)

requires two graves
4 (16.7%)

leaves everybody blind
1 (4.2%)

other
0 (0.0%)

ticky-box full of writing theory
8 (33.3%)

ticky-box full of brain being empty, but not in a meditation way
7 (29.2%)

ticky-box full of dabbling your toes in a tray of soft, cool, shimmery sand
11 (45.8%)

ticky-box full of the ancient language of shadows and flight
13 (54.2%)

ticky-box full of hugs
17 (70.8%)

Hurry home to you.

Jul. 15th, 2025 09:15 pm
hannah: (Travel - fooish_icons)
[personal profile] hannah
I went across town to gather the last of my pay this morning; I'd gotten a text a couple hours earlier telling me that the main receptionist was doing fine and didn't need additional support, so all I had left to do was get paid. I ended up deciding to take that vacation opportunity, with plans to come back fairly early Friday to make the evening showtime.

Worth noting is packing's not nearly the stressor it used to be. Especially not for just a couple of days. Not even music for the trip or what to bring in my backpack. There's no getting around the nervousness that comes from waiting for a train - especially with the downpour earlier this week, which tends to mess with schedules - or trying to fall asleep the night before. But there's a predictability to that, which makes accepting it easier.

Two non-fiction books

Jul. 15th, 2025 08:03 pm
lannamichaels: Text: "We're here to heckle the muppet movie." (heckle the muppet movie)
[personal profile] lannamichaels

  • Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens by David Mitchell (2023): [personal profile] lirazel posted about the audiobook version of this, which got me to put this on my list, but alas my library only has access to the print version; I feel that the audiobook version is probably superior. There were several parts in the book that were a slog to get through the paragraph, that would be perfectly fine if you were listening to a patented David Mitchell Rant about the subject. In fact, imagining them in David Mitchell's voice is how I got through them. Read more... )

  • Subpar Parks: America's Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors by Amber Share (2021): A bookified version of a Instagram account I never followed, a copy of which I read at someone's house who was using as a bookmark something that indicated they had gotten it as a gift when it came out and never got past the first fifth of the book. This book would have been fine if it had not decided it was going to fight the one star reviews, and instead just showed the artwork and mentioned how great the park was. As it was, it positioned itself as an argument between the one star reviewers and the author, and the one star reviewers won.Read more... )
musesfool: bright flowers in a watering can (the sun will shine again)
[personal profile] musesfool
They gave me a 3 pm - 7 pm delivery window for the dishwasher today, which meant waiting around and stewing in my anxiety until they showed up around 3:30. The whole process - removing the old dishwasher and setting up the new one - took about an hour. Now it's running through whatever the initial cycle the installation guys set it to, and then I should be able to use it. It did cost me an extra $125 to get the electrical connection set up, since the old one was hardwired and the new one required a plug, plus I gave both guys a $20 on the way out, so overall it cost almost $1800 for everything, which is more than my stove and fridge cost put together, iirc. It's the most expensive birthday present I've gotten myself since 2016, when I replaced my laptop, but totally necessary. And it is very snazzy looking! (it's the Bosch 300 series 18" dishwasher in stainless steel.)

Anyway, that has been my birthday! I put all thoughts of cooking on hold until tomorrow, when I might make pulled pork (or I might not) and some kind of fancy dessert (I am thinking about this coffee icebox cake but without a stabilizer in the whipped cream I don't know how it could hold its shape if you turn it out of the loaf pan; on the other hand, I'm not taking it anywhere so I can just scoop it out without removing it, so I guess that's not really an issue), but we'll see how I feel tomorrow - it will be cool to not have to wash up by hand afterwards!

Sunday at Dom's was lovely - Baby Miss L was a mermaid in the pool (she kept exclaiming, "Mermaid!" and kicking ferociously - she hasn't had swimming lessons yet but she seems like a natural at this point) - and once she warmed up after her nap she was her usual delightful self. She enjoyed the books I brought her, especially "Be Brave Like Batman" (to go with the Batman and Robin t-shirts), and she wore her Superman dress, so we are covering all superhero bases.

I made the KAF fudge brownies again to take with me, since I was assured that they'd loved them last time, and this time I got to taste them and they were good! Slightly overbaked, but still chocolatey.

Then yesterday on my ride home, the driver took Jericho Turnpike all the way to the Cross Island, which made the trip longer, but did avoid traffic and construction, so I guess the extra 10-15 minutes was worth it.

And I still have 6 more days off before I have to go back to work!

*

H/C Exchange

Jul. 14th, 2025 09:45 pm
snickfic: Herbert comforting Dan, text "Don't worry" (Re-Animator)
[personal profile] snickfic
Authors have revealed!

I wrote: everybody's on the run, Cuckoo (2024), Ed/Gretchen and Gretchen & Alma, post-canon, 2k. This fic was a surprise. I matched on Creator's Choice of Fandom, which meant I could write whateverfandom I wanted, and fresh off finishing my 20k Re-Animator fic, I planned to write more Re-Animator. I came up with several ideas, managed to write a solid 1100 words on one, and just completely stalled out. Instead I wrote this entire fic on the day of the deadline.

I think it turned out okay, though! I enjoyed this movie so much when I saw it earlier this year, especially the messy worldbuilding, and the ending is very wish-fulfillment, I feel, for a certain kind of viewer (which I guess I am, lol). It was fun to try to imagine what the immediate aftermath of everything might look like for these three.

Meanwhile, I received: You, Me, and the Serum Makes Three, Re-Animator, by [archiveofourown.org profile] psychomachia. Dan/Herbert, mpreg, 3k. Absolute galaxy-brained way to knock Dan up, A+. Just a very fun series of relationship development and pregnancy vignettes.
morgandawn: (Default)
[personal profile] morgandawn
 Fandom History: Persian/Farsi Speakers Needed
In late 2019, TV, movie, anime, gaming, celebrity, music, and book fans assembled to save Yahoo Groups after Verizon decided to shut down the mailing list service. Approximately 300,000 fandom groups have been saved. The Yahoo Gedden project is working on identifying the fandoms of Persian language mailing lists and can use your help. We need people who can read Persian/Farsi natively* right now to help us identify the Unknown groups. You can work at your own pace and it is a low time commitment. Work is done on Discord, just reading the group description and a few messages and summarizing the messages in English, maybe answering a question of clarification ("is it talking about X or Y?"). No software or other tools needed besides your phone/computer and access to Discord.


*We're not certain if these mailing lists are using a specific dialect or standard modern Farsi 

Readercon 2025

Jul. 14th, 2025 11:00 am
oracne: turtle (Default)
[personal profile] oracne
I’ll be at Readercon 34 this weekend after spending most of the last couple of weeks doing massive re-reads.

If you’ll be there, please feel free to stop and say hello! My schedule is below.

The Works of P. Djèlí­ Clark
Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT
Andrea Hairston [moderator]; Leon Perniciaro; Rob Cameron; Tom Doyle; Victoria Janssen
Our Guest of Honor P. Djèlí Clark rounded out his first decade as a published author with a Nebula and a Locus for his fantasy police procedural novel, The Master of Djinn, and both those awards plus a British Fantasy Award for his monster-hunting novella Ring Shout. His short story “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” is short-listed for the Hugo this year. As a History professor at University of Connecticut, he investigates the pathways leading from West African storyteller/poets (griots, a.k.a. djèlí) to the American abolitionist movement. Help us celebrate the works of our honored guest!

The Purposes of Memorable Insults in Sci-Fi and Fantasy
Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 5:00 PM EDT
Storm Humbert [moderator]; Anne E.G. Nydam; Charles Allison; Ellen Kushner; Victoria Janssen
Some of the most quotable lines in science fiction and fantasy are zingers. Wit can do a lot to build a character, a world, and a universe, and has the ability to either support or undermine reader expectations. This panel aims to explore and elaborate on the use of wit—and especially takedowns—in literature, exposing how a verbal jab can serve as more than just a punchline.

Moving from Traditional Publishing to Self-Publishing
Salon G/H Friday, July 18, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT
Victoria Janssen [moderator]; Cecilia Tan; Jedediah Berry; Sarah Smith; Steven Popkes
It’s becoming increasingly common to hear of authors whose self-published work was so successful that they were picked up by a traditional publisher. But what of the authors who have gone the other way, by turning their backs on traditional publishing and going into self-publishing? Panelists will survey the varying reasons for making this transition, how authors have navigated it, and what this might say about the state of publishing overall.

Kaffeeklatsch: Victoria Janssen
Suite 830 Friday, July 18, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT

The Works of Cecilia Tan
Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 12:00 PM EDT
Victoria Janssen [moderator]; Charlie Jane Anders; Laura Antoniou; Cecilia Tan (i)
Our Guest of Honor, Cecilia Tan, has a publication history that spans Asimov’s, Absolute Magnitude, Ms. Magazine, Penthouse, and Best American Erotica, among others. Writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy, especially as they intersect with erotica and romance, she is also the founder of Circlet Press, an independent publisher that specializes in speculative erotica. Her own writing earned a Lifetime Achievement for Erotica in 2014 from Romantic Times magazine. She also contributes to America’s other pastime, baseball, in her role as Publications Director for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Come hear our panel discuss Cecilia’s many talents and accomplishments.

Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies
Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT
Victoria Janssen [moderator]; Alexander Jablokov; J.M. Sidorova; Laurence Raphael Brothers; Steven Popkes
In fiction, bureaucracies are generally depicted as evil in its most banal form, yet many of the actual bureaucracies that shape our lives exist to protect us from corporate greed. How can—and should—we tell other stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies, particularly as the U.S. stands on the precipice of disastrous deregulation? And might fantasies of bureaucracy (such Addison’s The Goblin Emperor and Goddard’s The Hands of the Emperor) be the next cozy subgenre?

The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction
Create / Collaborate Saturday, July 19, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT
Kate Nepveu [moderator]; Claire Houck/Nina Waters; Laura Antoniou; Victoria Janssen
In an article of the same name (https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/endless-appetite-fanfiction), Elizabeth Minkel discussed how “2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides.” Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors?

Gratitudes dammit

Jul. 14th, 2025 09:31 am
kass: A glass of iced coffee with milk. (coffee)
[personal profile] kass
1. Murderbot! I deeply enjoyed the whole first season. I think they did a lovely job of translating from book into tv show, and Skarsgard has totally sold me on the role. (It helps that we know he loves the books too -- he wants to do right by them.)

2. Andor! I'm now seven episodes in and absolutely loving it. It feels awfully relevant to our moment. Also I am amused by the fact that this show also relies in part on the acting talent of a Skarsgard, just, y'know, a different one.

3. Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy by Martha Wells, published to celebrate the Murderbot S1 finale.

4. Cold coffee with milk and splenda, and a distant patch of blue in the cloudy skies.

5. All of my laundry is folded and put away. This is, as ever, a temporary state of affairs but it's a nice one while it lasts.

(no subject)

Jul. 13th, 2025 03:31 pm
missizzy: (Default)
[personal profile] missizzy
This was one of those weeks in our household. Events included my mother's consultation over her denture, which now won't be fixed until mid-August at the earliest, and her computer getting hit by a very scary virus, albeit one the IT people were able to remove very quickly once they remoted in. Meanwhile, I spent it trying to get a second refill of my bentyl after the I failed to get the first, even though the USPS website claimed it had been delivered. The way the post office has been going lately, I would have much rather gone to pick it up in person, but that proved impossible when Kaiser has no pharmacies open on weekends closer than Woodbridge! I got the email saying it shipped today, and I just have to hope it actually shows up this time. I've had to reduce my doses, and I'm currently trying to figure out the results of that.
I spent the weekend watching Wimbledon. I ended up turning off the ladies singles final, because that was just painful, but enjoyed the men's and both doubles finals.

Draped in bold every design

Jul. 13th, 2025 03:36 am
viridian5: (Winter Soldier)
[personal profile] viridian5
Having seen Lazarus to the end, I like it better now. I would've been happier if it didn't wait to explore who these characters are until the final episodes. It hits better on the second watch, knowing them now, and you pick up seeds it came back to later.

Toonami's marathon of the original Japanese today makes me regret seeing the dub first, because so many characters have so much more personality and often sass in the Japanese voice acting, like the AI helicopter in the clubbing episode, Popcorn Wizard in general, or Axel saying, "O. ne. gai?" with such attitude. I like the characters better in the sub! I especially like Axel better.

+++

I worried that all the hype might contaminate my view of Sinners when I saw it, and I was correct. I had issues with the pacing and tone shifts, and the major action sequence was sometimes an incoherent mess for me. Sometimes I was bored. spoilers ) But it's cinematic, some of the scenes are really great, and the music is lit. I probably would've enjoyed it a lot more if I saw it in a dark theater on a big screen with the speakers up instead of on my TV at home.

But I fully support less corporate, more original passion projects with different points of view and something to say.

+++

I watched Thunderbolts* via several reactions on YouTube and mostly enjoyed it. Something character-driven where it doesn't feel like CGI has eliminated all feeling of weight? Yay! Having so much done practically makes a big difference for me in the action scenes. The emphasis on mental health gave a nice angle, and it being a sympathetic view is much appreciated considering how Thor was treated as a joke in Endgame. The humor felt more appropriately used, instead of destroying or undercutting a lot of emotional moments like in many Marvel projects in recent years.

I like Bob, and Lewis Pullman does a great job, though I do side-eye Marvel for his presentation. The oversized and soft clothing, the floppy hair, his angsty, tragic white boyness.... It suggests Marvel is aware of certain things.... I'm amused that some fic posits that Bob's body had to have been reworked in many ways, since his drug abuse should suggest that spoilers ) I'm curious to see how Sentry is deployed in the future given all the risks using him invites and how OP he is.

It was nice seeing Bucky getting a heroic, hopeful-sounding musical accompaniment as he rides up on the motorcycle. The Winter Soldier theme was very, very cool, but it was a horror story. The movie seems to find the idea of Congressman Barnes as ludicrous as I do.

I didn't like the 14-month time skip at the end. It glosses over a lot. And why does Bucky look awful in it?

I'm very tired of Marvel movies having characters get thrown around several times in ways that should seriously injure or kill them, even the super soldiers, but they're always fine afterward.

I've seen some things online that say that spoilers ), and I agree. spoilers )

+++

Checking out the recent volume of translated My Hero Academia has me back on that, and some recent developments in it make me feel like the author has course-corrected on or justified some things I had problems with previously. It's nice to get out of the section where the art was so busy I sometimes had no idea what was going on.

A problem with getting back into MHA is seeing some online fans convinced that Bakugo Katsuki never did anything really that wrong, and the ways he's improved are enough to negate all the bad stuff in his past and how he continues to be a bit of an a-hole. They're like, "God, a character bullies another child for several years, including burning him at times, and tells him to jump off a roof and kill himself, and you haters will never get past that? He apologized! (Once.)" Correct, I won't. Some of them still wish he was the protagonist.

Like I'm not thrilled by online fans convinced that the MCU's John Walker never did anything really that wrong.

Watching My Hero Academia AMVs on YouTube have given me a greater appreciation for Deku's evolved fighting style, specifically the kicks, which he started using and developing after the ability he was given was too powerful for his body so he kept tearing up and breaking bones in his hands and arms and needed to shift some of it to a different part of his body as he trained. (Deku continues to learn and adjust over the seasons, but the kicks started it.)

+++

I've also followed the Murderbot TV show through reactions on YouTube and enjoyed it. Having David Dastmalchian in it certainly helps. That season finale was really something, and I'm glad it's getting a second season. The PresAux team didn't make much of an impression on me in the books, aside from Mensah.

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I'm not used to having so much new stuff to watch and think about over a summer.

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