Patron Saint of Falling Over Things

I got a wonderful gift in the Exchange of Interest:

all I ever meant to do was keep you
It's John and Grace, both separately dealing with their grief - Grace helping out a friend with their art store, John occasionally using the store as a place to warm up. It's wonderful, and full of heart. And clever little plotty twists. It's basically everything I could ask for in a fic. I love my fandom.


Pertinent to the last post about We Are Lady Parts, here are some other medias I have consumed in the past months.

War of the Worlds (2019)
Set in contemporary France, this Anglo-French reimagining of H. G. Wells' classic in the style of Walking Dead follows pockets of survivors forced to team up after an apocalyptic extra-terrestrial strike.

Weird, sometimes terrible and sometimes wonderful. Very violent. I liked the scope of the story, I liked a lot of the survivor storylines, but some of them were just dire.

( spoilery )


Creamerie
Eight years after a viral plague decimated all men, three dairy farmers from Hiro Valley accidentally run over the last surviving male human on the planet.

*nervous gigglesnort* When NZ makes a dark comedy, it's... really dark. This is set eight years after a virus has killed 99% of men. The three main characters are dairy farmers. The ruling body is a group of beautiful blonde women straight out of Mean Girls. The show is very pointy, looking at peformative feminism, fertility politics, mental health. It's really funny, it's really smart, there is a lot of semen.

Basically a rollercoaster between laughing hysterically, dying inside, and wanting to weep. In a good way.

( spoilers )


Shadow and Bone
Very competently done, lots of fun to watch. Don't have fannish feelings about it in particular? But I did enjoy yelling BIN BONS every time Kirigan was on screen. I kind of felt sorry for the volcra, to be honest? And the CGI stag. Poor old stag.


Beforeigners
The series takes place in Oslo, where sudden flashes of light appear in the bay in Bjørvika. People from different time periods—the Stone Age, Viking Age, and the 19th century—suddenly appear in the present. Police officer Lars Haaland meets the first "time migrants", who speak Old Norse.

Nearly two decades later, the so-called "Beforeigners" struggle to integrate into modern Norwegian society. Some 19th-century individuals found work as journalists, office workers, and teachers, while most of the old Norse folk are homeless and sleep in parks. The Stone-Agers mainly live at the fringes and in forests. Some modern Norwegians perceive these "refugees" as a drain on society.

This sounded kitsch as fuck to me, and I avoided watching it for a few months after it came out, because subtitles mean I can't crochet while I watch, so I save those times for things for which I have higher expectations. But then! I figured out how to crochet and read at the same time, so subtitled shows were back on the menu, and I'm glad, because this series was fabulous. 10/10, would watch ten more seasons of this. Second favourite thing this year, next to We Are lady Parts.

( kinda spoilery )


Clarice
*sigh* What a strange confluence of things this was. So much of it was murky and oddly paced. And pointlessly stylised. It was Hannibal, with no plot. And yet, and yet. If the show had been called Ardelia, and been about Ardelia's career path in the shadow of her famous friend, I would have watched it forever.


Ted Lasso
This was sold to me as delivering good feels of a similar calibre to The Good Place, and I was not misled. It's the story of an American football coach imported to the UK to coach soccer, when he has no experience at all.

I was continuously ready to cringe, and I don't think I actually did once? The show is sweet and gentle, without being saccharine or maudlin. I cried, but in a good way. I love every single character, except for the one played marvellously by Anthony Head, and his character I love to hate.

It is truly lovely.

( spoilers )

Onwards and upwards, trying to be more posty!

Nature report:
There's a flock of gang gang cockatoos in town! I've never seen them before but they are very pretty. I can't take my own photo because the flock is always at the bottom of a valley we drive through, and it's not a good place to stop. (It is a good place to drive into the river, though, hence our caution in the car) but I nicked a photo from Wiki:
( Gang gang under here )

We have bower birds in the garden. (This is a different situation to 'kangaroos in the top paddock', aka madness.) I've only seen the females, which are big and green and fond of eating leaves off the bay tree, but a friend has a male in her garden and he's built the most beautiful bower strewn with flower petals and blue plastic.
( Sexy tiems bower under here )

Escitalopram report:
I am less anxious than I was on nothing. I am less... happy? I don't know how to describe it - I think I was rapid cycling a bit before, so I'd have mini-highs and mini-lows. Now I'm level, and it feels a bit flat. But my executive function is a little better, and my motivation seems to be, too. All in all, I'm not suffering, but I'm not having those little peaks of excitation where lots of inspiration comes. Even though those little peaks also came with little troughs of depression, I kind of miss the highs. I'm not talking about the cycling that happens with bipolar conditions - this is tiny, tiny stuff compared to that. I don't want to be appropriating terms - I just can't find a better way to explain it to myself. (And to my therapist, whom I shall be seeing tomorrow.)

Media Report:
The City and the City:
One episode in: this is gorgeous and dreamy and weird (and dripping wet, in the case of Besźel, where the first episode is set.) The story is a police procedural, and the premise is that it's set in and around two cities that occupy the same space, so a kind of dimensional situation, with legal ramifications if you acknowledge the existence of the other city. I haven't read the book, but it has that China Miéville of a beautifully crafted world that you learn about from a very close focus. And the cast is very good: David Morrisey, Lara Pulver. The standout for me is Mandeep Dhillon as Const. Lizbyet Corwi.
( I put a pic under here... )

Counterpart:
Again, I'm one episode in. (My concentration might be a bit borked?) This is basically a Fringe AU, which cracks me up. In Berlin, there's a point where two universes intersect, thanks to Cold War ~science. J. K. Simmons plays two iterations of the same man, one from each universe, in what seems to be an espionage drama. I liked? But I wasn't overwhelmed.

The Good Fight, S1
Loved! Loved where it went, loved how the characters developed, loved that it was basically less gross than The Good Wife was about sex. Loved the cameos from The Good Wife, especially Elsbeth. Loved that there were happy and queer characters that did not get killed. I did not love the tendency towards the corporate voting schemes - who's stabbing who in the back today? How many votes does each person have? This was one of my least favourite things about The Good Wife and one I'm sensitised to because I blew through seven season of TGW in a few weeks, so the takeovers and schemes seemed to be constant. I hope it stops in S2? It hasn't, from the first two episodes I've seen. It's boring storytelling, and the writers can do better.

Fandom report:
There's not very much longer if you're signing up for multifandomdrabble! Sign-ups are here. (Go and request Person of Interest, if you're in that fandom! I want to write you treats!)

poi_fanworks is hosting a Person of Interest Big Bang! The timetable is here, and sign-ups are open until July 18th. Pls sign up! Pls write me long fic.

fandomgiftbox sign-ups are open, too, until the end of June. Here's a link: Sign-up post. (Nobody has requested Person of Interest yet, I'm just saying.)

Holy shit, I've become mono-fannish. That's... an odd feeling for me. It's not like I wouldn't write anything else? I just feel like POI is what I want to write. All the time.

Happy Thanksgiving, USians! Hope you are full of good things and nice feelings, or at least not miserable. Enforced family jollity can be the opposite of fun, so hang in there, if you're working hard on that level. *hugs all around*


1. I found an Australian version of Graze, the subscription service that sends you tasty snacks in the mail in a pretty box: Harvest Box. It does have some fairly dodgy "We're nuts about nuts!" blather on their website, but the box is fun and I'm enjoying having a protein-y snack during work. I share a box with lilacsigil, and we have one snack each on Thursday and Friday. We've had two boxes so far, and I think I'll keep going.

( Here's last week's box. Can't take a photo of this week's because we et it already. )

It's $7.95 a week. The packaging is recyclable, and the snacks are inventive, so overall, I think I'm going to stick with it for now. I have a code for half-price packs, if anyone wants to try it out. Lemme know!


2. The local pool opened this week for early morning laps, and we've been twice. Which is awesome. The water is EFFING COLD. Which is not so awesome. If, at 7am AEST, your dogs twitch and the windows break, that will be me, failing to embrace my inner penguin.


3. Our Relay For Life team is having a sausage sizzle tomorrow, yay! We will have sausages in bread at work! I was amazingly productive last night, and made chocolate brownies and sesame squares to sell at the adjacent cake stall. This is the first Relay For Life event since the car accident - Shirley was a team-leader - so we're all a bit on tenterhooks but I'm hoping it does well. Also, sausage! Inna piece of bread! Probably with onions!


4. Local birdlife has hatched their babies, and we get to see all the adolescent birds learning how to bird. There's a family of magpies that come to our back yard, and the adolescent magpies are ridic and adorable, and lazy. They do not want to bird! They don't want to hunt for grubs! I know when they've arrived, because they have a whingey kind of EEEEEEE EEEEEEEE EEEEEEE cry, which I can only interpret as "Mum, Mum, why can't you just spew down my throat? I'M HUNGREEE! MUM MUM MUM!" Their parents ignore them, and eventually they start digging for grubs, but there's a lot of EEEEE EEEEE EEEEE and also some faceplanting, because balance is hard.

There's a family of wood ducks that live in the creek behind work, and they're much more polite. Soft quacky noises only, and everyone, even the teenagers, busily grubbing away.


5. Loving TV right now! Sleepy Hollow, SHIELD, Elementary. We're giving Almost Human a go even though I'm not sure yet if it's meant to be a dystopian story of the rights of the individual, or a massive bro-yay party. (Or ro-yay, as lilacsigil calls it.)


Hey, can someone give me a vertigo report on Catching Fire? Is it as bad as the first movie? (Which I would give a 9.5 on the Blair Witch Scale.) I'd like to see it with lilacsigil, but Hunger Games was pretty much unwatchable for her. I'm hoping a different director will be good.

Really enjoyed the opening ceremony - Prospero and Newton and Stephen Hawking, and nobody used the word inspiring once. (I think Channel 4 might have issued a blanket ban on the word, which is good thinking. I wish I could say the same for the Australian commentary.) I loved the inclusion of the phrase "For those who are able" in the request for people to stand for the National anthem. That's something that I hope becomes a standard thing.

Sir Ian McKellan was brilliant in his button coat. Miranda with her punky blue hair was just fantastic. (Get her on TV now, someone! I would pay good money to see her as the next companion in Doctor Who.) The two of them were awesome together, and Sir Ian's incredibly dorky dancing made me grin. I loved the umbrella theme, the physics ballet, the book seagulls and how much fun everyone was having. On a more serious note, Channel 4 had a Canadian paralympian athlete commentating on the show. He had a lot to say about the inequality of access to equipment and training between nations, and how that's the next thing the Paralympics should be working on, which. Yeah.

The Lexi system they're using to explain the classification system for the categories is really straight forward. They explain what the physical abilities of the athletes are, and what that means for that particular sport. It's enhanced the way we understand the strategies the athletes are using in their events. I think I love the Paralympics for the chance to see all the adaptive technology in use - the pool has adjustable starting blocks, for example, that's something new. But the most awesome thing is that there are more and more athletes that have competed in the able-bodied Olympics first. I hope that one day the two events can be fully integrated. They had a go at Sydney, with a couple of demonstration events but it doesn't seem to have caught on.

But the sports are fantastic - there's an easy-going, friendly atmosphere about each event, all the athletes seem to be good friends, and I love all the hugging at the end of each race or game. It's great to see new world records popping up again and again - part of this being a relatively young event, and one in which adaptive technology and training are making big and rapid changes in the way the events play out.

If you're an Aussie or if you use a proxy, you can see the Aussie coverage on the ABC iView. It's pretty good - occasional maudlin moments, but on the whole it's a thousand times better than Channel Nine's commentary for the able-bodied Olympics.



My Nonna is doing well! She had surgery the day after she fell, to put a plate in her hip where she fractured it. On Saturday she moved to a rehab centre, she's started sitting up in a chair for most of the day, and today she took a few steps in physio. The family has settled somewhat, I think? My Auntie flew out from Canada last week, and she's been co-ordinating care and hospital transfers and so on. But nobody is talking about the big issue, which is making the house safe for Nonna and Poppy or investigating alternative safe housing. I am staying out of it now - just keeping in touch with Nonna. I sent her a postcard from Mount Gambier, and I'm hoping to make it down to Melbourne again before my Auntie goes back to Canada.



I learned a new word from my therapist, about a thing I do: when I get all doom-laden, I'm catastrophising. That is EXACTLY what I do. I guess knowing is a good start on the way to heading that tendency off. (But the last couple of weeks, with Nonna, and family stuff, has meant a lot of catastrophising.)



Things that exist that seem too awesome to exist:

Sue Perkins is writing a TV show where she plays a forty year old gay vet who hasn't come out to her parents yet.

THIS:



Gillian Anderson and Archie Panjabi! Together they solve crime!

It snowed! In my profile, anyway. Thank you everyone for the snowflake cookies - I think I had as much fun sending them as receiving them. It was quite the flurry on LJ yesterday.

It's actually deliciously cold today, and we're lounging around, eating the remains of lilacsigil's birthday pavlova, and playing Mario Kart. (We weren't supposed to open it until we'd finished our NaNo, but since we're both now over 56K and still going, it seemed fair to get our reward. We're saving the new Super Mario Bros for when we actually type "The End".)

I'm reading the Luxe series by Anna Godbersen, and it's made me think about why I can't engage with Gossip Girl, when basically both stories have the same premise, setting, and character archtypes. Luxe and its three sequels are set about a hundred years before Gossip Girl, though, and this apparently makes the difference for me. With Gossip Girl (the TV series, not the books), I keep trying to connect with the characters, but end up frustrated with their terrible ennui, and shout at the characters a lot. ("If your life is so unfulfilling, go, volunteer in Sierra Leone or something!") But with the Luxe series, even though the characters are just as privileged and pointless, I am engaged and interested in them. lilacsigil gruesomely suggests that it's because they could all die of cholera or polio at any minute. I would like to think that I'm not that morbid. Maybe the historical setting gives me something else to focus on besides the terrible, dreary ordeal of being rich and white in New York? Or perhaps it's the elaborate descriptions of corsetry.

Or maybe it's the fact that Gossip Girl apparently has early 80's Debbie Harry in the cast and this scares me:

( My Debbie Harry is pastede on yay! (Do we still say that?) )

On the other hand, I'm still really enjoying Mercy. It seems that the best thing for me to watch while riding the exercise bike is medical dramas, and there's well and truly enough to keep me going through the week: House, Mercy, Three Rivers, and I'm catching up on Nurse Jackie which is hilarious but not quite long enough to see me through one workout. Is Hawthorne any good? Are there any others I'm missing? (The soapier shows like Grey's Anatomy are too slow for exercise.)

Considering that I had zero expectations, Three Rivers is surprisingly watchable. It would be better if it were the Doctor Zero (from Wolverine) and Doctor Shane (from The L Word) show, but it works for me. It's incredibly self-indulgent and syrupy with its issue of the week - this week, racism!, next week - healthcare funding for refugees! And it does have unintentionally hilarious moments (the sight of the dewy ER intern sobbing as she washed the blood from her young patient's sneakers, or the heart-transplant Leader of the Pack storyline) but at least it entertains. And the medicine isn't too bad.

Oh, oh! Do you know what? We may actually have succeeded in our pathetic attempts at horticulture! We have tiny tomatoes on our tomato plant! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? They're only the size of a fingernail, but they're there. On the vine. We may even get to eat them. And Project Eggplant 2.0 is going quite well so far - the plants are as big now as last year's were in February. I am hopeful that these skills we are nurturing will serve us well in the grim apocalypse times. (Because three fingernail sized tomatoes will surely feed us for weeks!)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAH! Which is to say, we just watched Sarah Connor Chronicles.

( spoiler cuts are shiny )

And in other news, the Large Hadron Collider has failed to blow us up again. The world gets a stay of execution for another month. Then the giant krill will come seeping through the wormhole. And I, for one, welcome our crustacean overlords. I think it's time for an apocalypse tag.

How awesome is The Middleman? How smart, how funny, how sexy is Wendy Watson? How can this possibly be a kid's show? And most importantly, how long can it last without being axed for all the reasons listed above?

In other news, my knee made a ferocious click, and now I can't straighten my leg. *limps like a pirate*

HA HA HA OMG THE US LIFE ON MARS TRAILER IS UP ON YOUTUBE!

*cues twangy guitars*

Cry, Sam Tyler, cry!

Oh, Colm Meaney! You're the best. *dies* It might even be awesome!<sup>*

*</sup>It might just be possible that I have fried my on brain on Baileys and my xmenfirstclass fic.

Australia's Next Top Model is a clone of the American show - and I am not ashamed to say I watch this show and I love it. It's the only show where I can hear bogans slagging off at each other in broad 'Strine accents. It's completely pointless, brain-dead entertainment.

An essential check-list:
Make-up lord, Napoleon Perdis, still tangerine-orange - check!
Alex Perry still a short and mean little guy kvetching about the height of the models - check!
Completely pointless judgments that are contradicted by the same person five seconds later - check!
Most unique looking girl the first to be eliminated - check!

Best insult of the night: "You're a f***ing ugly derro mole!"

Jodhi Meares is shaping up to be an excellent host - she throws the truth at those girls, hard and cold. "You look like you should be at Byron, playing the bongos." Hee!

Next week: the downstairs makeover! Sweet!

I realised that people like me, with irrational cocooning issues on holidays, are meant to travel in caravans. So I'm going to try harder not to laugh and point at all the Britz campervans that weave and wobble up and down the Great Ocean road. Instead, I will try to empathise and understand them, even when they're rude and say stupid things about country people.

Reading: Summerlands by Michael Chabon
I'm enjoying it a lot, although I'm in a sad part right now and keep putting it down.

Re-reading: Obernewtyn by Isobelle Carmody
Last time I read this, I was in Sea Lake on the Mallee, in 40+ degree heat, so all I could remember about it was that I was annoyed when I'd finished reading it. Looking back, I put that down to being hot and miserable, but as it turns out, the ending is really annoying and the last chapter is short and full of exposition. It's like she wrote the whole story (the other parts of which I haven't yet read) and the editors arbitrarily sliced it into three parts, and she had to write a scrappy little bit at the end of the first book to make it work. I'd like to read the other books, but just like last time, I feel too narked to cough up money for them. Unlike last time, I have an LJ so I can look back on what I thought. Hey, future me! Pick the other books up cheap on eBay or something!

Watching: Girl With a Pearl Earring
Finally, after sitting on the shelf for months and months, we've seen it. It was beautiful, and the light made it seem very cold.

Re-watching: Recently started again with Buffy season 1. Oh, the love! I love it so much more the second time around. I'd also like to watch Firefly again. But it's so hard to find the time to actually watch stuff, and we're trying to catch up on Farscape, and Alias. So many TV shows, so little TV time.