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i watch things

Superman (2025)

As superhero movies go, this is a very good superhero movie. As regular movies go, I kept being annoyed about the seriously compressed timeline and some really basic suspension of disbelief, like "is anyone going to say Lex Luthor is lying about translation" because, uh. Also, how does anyone know Kryptonian? So many little things just drove me up the wall.

However! It was a good movie, and the Clark/Lois stuff was very well done, I actually really loved their interview/fight because it worked so well in with characterization, it didn't strike my "I cannot, I cannot, I cannot" that I tend to have about couples arguing.

The main effect of the movie was, after it was revealed that Lex had people going over every inch of every Superman fight so he could get a single strand of Superman's hair so he could clone him -- I went and reread some old favorite Smallville fics. Good times.

The movie also did something I noticed with the Knives Out 2: Glass Onion film, where it made the Cool Evil Rich Villain... not come off very compelling on the slash goggles. I did not walk out of this movie shipping Clark/Lex, even though I ship Clark/Lex. Lex Luthor, played by Why Do I Recognize Him Oh That's The Boy From About A Boy, is very well done and very well performed and is not a magnificent bastard and he has zero chemistry with Clark, but not in a way that detracts from the film. This is not a film where Clark and Lex have ever been on good terms; this is not a film where they even ever knew each other. There was nothing about the movie that was in the same flavor or theme as Smallville, but hey, always fun to go reread some stuff.

But for a movie that did Lois so well, did we have to have Eve The Awful Clingy Obsessive Wannabe Girlfriend with Jimmy who did not want to date her, just wanted info from her? That was so hard to endure. I think worse of the movie for making that decision, it casts a long tail on the movie even a week after I finished it, like "oh yeah so that was a movie that made me go reread some old fics from 20 years ago, and also had this unnecessarily misogynistic sideplotline played for laughs (?)".

Nathan Fillion also appeared to be treating this film as "I will do bad acting on purpose to show that my character is a buffoon" but mostly it just came off annoying.

I also have a nit to pick with this movie that is solely from watching it with the DVD closed captions, which kept noting when the main Superman theme was playing, which is: the soundtrack to this movie is ... well, it's got some perfectly acceptable pop songs peppered in. But the rest of it is just so bland.

But this movie is better than every MCU movie I've seen, with the exception of Captain America 2: A Good Spy Movie With I Guess Absolutely Zero Repercussions For The Worldbuilding Oh Well.

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"The Deere Files Podcast Presents: The Heirs Of Samuel Westing." (The Westing Game) G

Title: The Deere Files Podcast Presents: The Heirs Of Samuel Westing.
Author:

lannamichaels
Fandom: The Westing Game
Rating: G
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: What do a Supreme Court Justice, the chairwoman of the board of the largest employer in Wisconsin, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, the inventor of Hoo's Little Foot-Eze innersoles, and a dead union organizer who didn't exist have in common?

( There was no such person as Barney Northrup )

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Rec: The Scum Villian's Self-Saving System

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Rec: Heaven Official's Blessing

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Fandom Trees!

fandomtrees posts have been going up, and mine was in the most recent batch, yay! This is one of my favourite events of the season (next to Yuletide) - I loved

fandom_stocking back in the day, and this is still just as much fun.

Here's my tree, and this is what I'm requesting this year:

Grimm
镇魂 | Guardian (TV)
Grimm/Guardian crossover
镇魂 | Guardian RPF
Legend of the Seeker
Sherlock (BBC)
绅探 | Detective L
山河令 | Word of Honor, 天涯客 | Faraway Wanderers
Once Upon a Time in Wonderland
Chinese fic recs
food or cooking icons

Hoping to see some of you there too! Especially since this is one of those events where you're doing people a favour by signing up - the more requests there are, the more other people can find someone to create something for. :D

ETA: Sign-ups here!

Current Mood: nostalgic

New Stargate?!

According to Gateworld, Amazon (which owns the franchise now *sighs*) has greenlighted a new Stargate series! And it's not a reboot!

I was never into SG-1, and I still resent Brad Wright and Joe Mallozzi for the way they ditched SGA in favour of SGU, dumped on SGA's female fans, and then were offended when SGA fans weren't interested in SGU. But I really loved Stargate Atlantis. It was my main fandom for many years, and I have so many fond memories both of the show and the fandom. I haven't rewatched it in a while, but it's one of the things on my list that I definitely want to go back to when I have some time and no energy for new stuff.

My main ship was McShep, but even more than that, Sheppard was my favourite character, and I loved reading Sheppard gen. My secondary ship - a tiny pool noodle of a rarepair - was Teyla/Bates, and I still wish it had been more popular. (Maybe if I'd written fic myself? Unlikely, but ... *g*)

Still, even though I was very active in SGA - I co-ran

sga_newsletter, co-modded

mcshep_match and

mensa_au and

teyla_bates, among other things - I never wrote any fic for it. Part of it is that I got into SGA during my three-year writers' block (which Doctor Who eventually broke), but even afterwards, despite my brain being constantly full of scenarios, they never crossed that line into writing. Possibly in part because the fandom was big and kept me busy! But surely that can't explain it entirely, and I'm honestly not sure what other reasons there might be. (Why do some fandoms never make me write? A mystery for the ages! *g*) Anyway, it'll be interesing to see, when I eventually rewatch again, whether that'll change ...

And it's very unlikely the same magic will happen twice, but when/if a new Stargate show does happen, unless the premise is itself unappealing, I'm absolutely giving it a chance.

Entry tags:

books,
reading

Wednesday reading

Finished since the last reading post
The Lost Abbot, with a suitably large and confusing number of deaths during Matthew and friends' stay in Peterborough looking for the abbot who seems to have disappeared.

Also finished The End of Innocence. It was good, a mix of personal stories interspersed with the more factual narrative. With it being a book originally published in the mid-1990s and reprinted in 2021, as a reader you have a different point of view than the first readers at the time.

Currently reading
In the middle of The Instrumentalist Harriet Constable, which I'm really enjoying. And have just about made a start on The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian

Reading next
Not sure

Entry tags:

dentists,
personal

Finished dental treatment

After five months and eight appointments, the tooth that started troubling me in June now has its permanent crown. The fitting it today was a bit trickier than I or the dentist had imagined, but we got there in the end. We have a health-related cashback benefit at work so I finally put the paperwork together and submitted a claim. Usually, it's just a question of attaching your receipt and that's it, but with so many appointments and payments made in stages, I ended up putting together an entire document in addition to a scan of the treatment plan and scans of the receipts. Not sure if it works out, and even when it does, it's not going to be anywhere near the entire cost of treatment, with my cover being just at the basic level where I don't pay anything extra.

I think I'm due a normal check-up soon, but perhaps that will be pushed forward with the number of times I've been at the dentist over the past months.

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Rec: The Scum Villian's Self-Saving System

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This one's on me, I admit it.

Free Bird (Lynyrd Skynyrd) has now joined Breakfast In America (Supertramp) in the storied annals of: *actually pays attention to the lyrics for the first time* this song's about WHAT?

"Lanna, what did you think Free Bird was about?"

IDK, SOMEONE WHO LIKES TRAVELING!

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trains

Back home

This morning brought sunshine, slightly hazy, but absolutely gorgeous nonetheless. I ventured out for some parkrun tourism and it was great to be out in that sunshine, even if the wind was rather brisk and chilly.

My train from Edinburgh departed at midday, so I didn't really have time for anything apart from parkrun. The journey was uneventful and I spent it reading. And the cross-London transfer and train journey home were equally unremarkable. There were some delays and changes on GWR trains after Storm Claudia, but that didn't really affect me, as I'd always aim for whichever would depart next. All the issues were apparently further west down the line.

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Great Plans (And How They Crumble)

I had such great plans for Yuletide. I’m so inspired, I can’t even decide which story I want to write for my recipient and which for myself. Canon review was awesome, I started writing to get into the groove and really felt like that first scene came together on Monday like nothing I’ve written in months did. I was so looking forward to the scene I’d planned to write next, on Tuesday. I love it when writing feels like that. I wanted to write all the novellas and treats…

Then Tuesday hit. Instead of the regular two and a half hours of commute, it was five. And until the last couple of hundred meters, I wasn’t sure if I’d make it. Like, when the train finally started, the train driver told us he didn’t know if we’d make it to the end. It was a broken interlocking system. You know, the brand new one that went online last month… In the end, I crashed so badly, physically and mentally, I would have had to call in sick if it hadn’t been for my boss mercifully granting me home office for the rest of the week after I told him my usual train wouldn’t run for the rest of the week and I’d have to take an earlier one. It took me all three working days and two pain pills to regain a semblance of functionality.

Oh, and then I found out that my usual train won’t run for another month, because absolutely nobody understands the train company’s emergency schedules, myself included. So, yeah, I think that was it as far as my grand Yuletide plans are concerned. Especially since I’ve already been through more than half the trains not running for a month once, and the ones that do run… well. I expect a few more Tuesdays, and hardly any free time.

In other news: I think I’ve finally got my first slightly wanky programming opinion. Usually I’m the person who says do whatever works for you, but even I have my breaking point. If you’re going to type anything slightly challenging any, why are you even using TypeScript? JavaScript is right there and there’s nothing wrong with it! (Guess who’s had to delint somebody else’s codebase this week...)

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Art and history

Today, I started my day by heading out to the National Galleries Modern. There's actually Modern One and Modern Two, but I only went to the former. There are some sculptures outside, too. Like the name suggests, the art on display is from 1900 onwards or so, mostly organised thematically. Very enjoyable. I had lunch there before taking the steps down from the museum to the riverside and following the Water of Leith walkway for a while for my walk back towards the city centre. There's an Antony Gormley sculpture in the river, and a riverside AIDS memorial.

Before going to the National Museum of Scotland, I made detour to the National Galleries National shop. At the National Museum, there was so much to see I barely made it through two areas.

The weather today was a clear improvement on yesterday: clear and bright if not particularly sunny, although breezier and a bit colder than yesterday. It had cleared rained during the time I'd been in the National Museum, and there was some more before I made it back to where I'm staying. I probably don't have time for anything much tomorrow before my train south departs.

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Notes from The Westing Game Podcast Fic

-the book does not take place in a specific year but it takes place on specific days of the week corresponding to days of the month: November 15th is explicitly a Saturday.

The book was published in 1978. November 15th was not a Saturday in 1978. In previous fics, I've just set it in 1978 anyway, because who cares. And I did that here but it's bothering me that, especially when I need to reference things on a specific date, the day/week doesn't match up.

So I opened Excel to find what year(s) in the 1970s had a date/weekday correspondance. And it's only 1975.

The moon phases don't match up to 1975 but the moon phases are not something that is going to bother me; me specifically having the start of the game happen in the middle of the week instead of Sunday, that bothers me.

And still I dithered because I'd made myself a reference table with the heirs's birth years based on their ages in canon and then how old they'd be in 2007, when the fic is set, and I'd used that throughout the fic, and if I changed it to 1975, I'd have to change all of that. aldkfa;ldkfja;lkdjsfalks

But I'm going to do it anyway, and not only because I was like "okay wait, when you change everything and actually save the excel file this time instead of just copying the table with | into scrivener, make sure you have Crow's birthyear right because her birthday is Nov 15, so her age given in her bio will not be the year she turns during canon" and it turns out I'd had it wrong in the reference table anyway.

So now I need to change every single year that is mentioned at any point in the fic but at least it won't bother me anymore, the day of the week problems.

THEY UPDATED THE BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOK

All right. So. Rosalie, Flora Baumbach's daughter. She is referred to as a "Mongoloid" child in the book. She is referred to as that in both physical copies of the book I have.

But also I got the ebook out from the library to have on my phone too while doing this because why the hell not, and! it turns out! that the line that was originally "She had a retarded daughter, Rosalie, a Mongoloid child", now it just says "She had a disabled child, Rosalie"! (I give them only half a point in cutting "retarded" since they keep "retarded" in the discussion between Theo and Mrs. Baumbach about Chris)

Now, yes, I am fine with them removing both those terms BUT BUT BUT now since they just went with "disabled", now you have to rely on context clues and physical description of Rosalie to know that she had Down's!

It's an incredibly minor characterization detail, but I think it's a VERY IMPORTANT minor characterization detail in how Mrs. Baumbach relates to 1) Chris, and 2) Turtle, that Rosalie had Down's. And now it's "idek, figure it out from the clues we'll pepper in". JUST SAY SHE HAD DOWN'S SYNDROME. IT'S IMPORTANT.

And great, from a canon review/consistency stage, now I have to worry what else was changed in the book. (I haven't spotted any other changes but I did spot a typo: Sam Westing is called "Sara Westing" at one point. THAT WOULD BE A VERY DIFFERENT BOOK. DON'T GET ME WRONG, I WOULD READ THAT BOOK. BUT THAT IS NOT THIS BOOK.)

It was not until this day (or, uh, yesterday? Two days ago? Some point in recent history) that I realized that... maybe Flora Baumbach is Jewish? Jake Wexler is textually. But... was I supposed to get the impression that Flora Baumbauch, nee Miller, is Jewish? Because the character never did that for me at any point at any time in the decades I have been rereading this book, but some of her various backstory details... uh, is she Jewish and I just never noticed?

Also Denton Deere seems to have massively changed medical specialties during the book but you know what, that's unimportant.

I appreciate that the book tells me that Turtle did not change her name upon marriage. I had to make an executive decision that Alice is just Deere, she is not hyphenated, even though she'd be in peak generational and peak socio-economical to be Wexler-Deere. But I made it just Deere for narrative reasons.

Why do I keep stumbling into fandoms where I have to make decisions about the last name of canonical children of the characters. Why.

Also I had to decide if Angela changed her name but at least that's not a load-bearing decision. She's an orthopedic surgeon. She's probably Dr. Wexler at work! But did she otherwise change it? Did she hyphenate? There's a good chance she hyphenated.

Dr. Deere is her husband, Dr. Wexler is her father... Angela, what did you do. (I have it as Dr. Deere right now and will likely keep it that way, on the theory that Grace pushed her hard to change her name and Angela went along with it.)

bad/good

Bad things:

Ten-hour days at work.

Brains that are mush and will not word.

Too many appointments next week, on top of work.

Good things:

Super mild November weather that let me ride a bike today (during my lunch break) without getting chilled. And tomorrow again, it looks like!

Delicious home-cooked food from the freezer that only needs heating up with zero effort on my part. (Thanks, past me!)

ficinabox has a two-week extension! Now I can expand that thing I wanted to expand. :D

fandomtrees is open for sign-ups!

In conclusion, the good things are better than the bad things are bad. Yay? *g*

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November rain in Edinburgh

Last night, instead of starting to settle for the night I headed out to travel to London Euston to catch Caledonian Sleeper to Edinburgh. I got onboard soon after it opened after 10.30pm and settled down to sleep fairly soon, but wasn't really asleep when we departed a quarter to midnight. I slept rather fitfully and when my alarm went off at seven in the morning I thought there was something odd going on. It took me a little while to figure out what it was from what was hearing and what Caledonian Sleeper had messaged. We were being held at Carlisle because the line was blocked ahead. The reason was initially cited as a broken-down train, later they suggested the breakdown was related to flooding on the line. In any case, we stood at Carlisle long enough that the Edinburgh portion ended up arriving over two hours behind schedule. That was actually fine with me, as I'd been wondering what I'd do in the morning if it was raining heavily and I'd have two hours to kill. In the end, I just took my bigger bag to left luggage and headed straight out to the National Galleries of Scotland, the National, and enjoyed looking at art there. After it, I went to St. Giles and had a look around and did some walking about at the castle end of the Royal Mile. And then went to the castle, where I had the official guided tour, followed by visiting some of the buildings at the site. Even on a grey rainy day, the views were wonderful. And although rain made it harder to just enjoy walking around, it wasn't anything I hadn't expected and the forecast for tomorrow is better.

Writing update

In order of deadlines:

Fic in a Box: I'm deep into the rewriting/editing and can't talk about any of it without breaking anonymity. *g* Reveals were supposed to be Saturday night, but we'll know by tomorrow morning whether there'll be a delay. It's looking very likely, and honestly, I'm not complaining.

Yuletide: Only a very vague idea so far. Once FIAB is over I'll do thorough canon revision (thankfully it's not one of the fandoms where that would take me fifty million hours), hammer out a proper plot, and then there'll be plenty of time left to actually write. It helps that December will be less busy at work again!

Five Figure Fanwork Exchange: Until today I only had a very vague idea of "I want to do something in that era of canon that my recipient mentioned", but today I went on a walk during my lunch break and a concept popped into my head fully-formed. I still need to figure out about half the plot, but that's for after Yuletide. (Unless it just pops into my head like this too! I wouldn't complain. *g*)

Other writing: Ahahaha, what other writing? I have no time and so many things to do. RL is so busy right now ... /o\

Entry tags:

books,
reading

Wednesday reading

Finished since the last reading post
Co-intelligence by Ethan Mollick, which was OK. It's subtitled Living and working with AI, so that's what it does, proposing principles of how to adopt AI and the roles you can usefully cast into—as a coworker, tutor, and so on.

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson, with Jackson trying to find the biological family of a woman whose adoptive parents moved from Yorkshire to New Zealand when she was a baby, and feeling he's not really getting anywhere, totally unaware of all the other changes happening in the lives of the people who he needs to talk to. This book kept surprising me.

Currently reading
Started reading The Lost Abbot by Susanna Gregory, where Matthew and company are in Peterborough looking for the abbot who's disappeared but many assume is already dead. No progress with anything else, I don't think.

Reading next
I've packed one more book for this week's trip but mostly just keeping with the books I'm already reading.