bironic

grrrrrr

2019-06-28T01:23:34Z

HA HA, surprise, my landlady is selling the apartment after all! This news comes 48 hours before I fly overseas for 9 days, plus I am gone the week straddling July and August as well as a long weekend in mid-August for Fanworks, which means I am in for the pre-September crunch I was dreading, minus the month I just lost where I could have been apartment hunting. (I didn't want to apartment hunt if I didn't have to. I've written 6,500 words of fic in that time and had some quality get-togethers with friends. Still.)

At least... I don't have to agonize about the decision anymore, because it's been made for me? The Boyle family way.

Ugh. Gonna try to put it out of mind and focus on conference/vacation. Switzerland!

*

Meanwhile: People are into the Good Omens adaptation. I didn't have many feelings about the book years ago and haven't watched the show yet. Been bookmarking your stories and recs for later, though.

And RIP Billy Drago. :( AV Club story, and Legacy.com. Most recently mentioned at the bottom of the Northern Exposure vid post here.

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The devil you know

2019-04-30T21:49:39Z

"Hooray," I need to move sometime in the next several months!

My landlady has begun taking steps to assess and likely sell the condo I have rented from her since coming to Boston for this job 5 1/2 years ago. She said she would offer me right of first refusal to buy it, but since I probably can't afford its market rate, nor do I think I'd want to spend that kind of money on a ground-floor one-bedroom with a list of issues anyway, it's time to hunt.

Which means finding realtors/brokers, answering the "rent vs. buy" question—nothing like trying to gauge how long you plan on staying in one place when you are at the same time wondering how much you like your job anymore—recalculating budgets, navigating the fact that more than 70% of Boston-area apartments turn over on June 1 or September 1, paring down belongings in advance of packing...

Sigh. I like stability. I was not planning on shopping for a new home this summer—or sooner. Then again, this is an opportunity to improve some bothersome things, like not being able to arrange furniture in a satisfying way for company or park in a driveway.

The stop-motion cartoon Rilakkuma and Kaoru did not deliver the comfort I sought but did instead offer the counsel I needed when I watched an episode after the landlady's phone call. Rilakkuma befriended some snowmen only to wake up the next day to discover that they had melted. "It's impossible for them to stay the same forever," Kaoru soothed him as he cried. Then the closing aphorism said: THINGS CHANGE.

.

Speaking of cycles and change: friends seem to be going through a full range of experiences lately.

[talk of pregnancy, babies, grief]

I have a friend who just had a baby, a friend who just lost a baby, a friend who's recently pregnant, a friend who's wrestling with trying to get pregnant.

I have a friend who was fired unexpectedly, a friend who started a new job one year to the day after being fired, a friend who's afraid of being fired every day even though she keeps being given raises.

Etc.

Take care of yourselves out there, everyone.

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March madness

2019-03-27T00:43:07Z

Doing: I confess I am not doing great, friends. It's probably just cyclical biochemistry, but combined with shenanigans at the office and acknowledgement that I need to turn back to medicine in search of help for stuff that therapy didn't budge after two years—even though it was dissatisfaction with medical solutions that sent me to therapy in the first place—there's been more than the usual amount of existential reflection and droopiness. Work is not getting done. Fun is not really happening either. I feel defeated in several arenas. Stuff annoys me everywhere I turn: an intractable audio delay on the Roku I bought over the holidays because the old one couldn't run apps anymore, road closures, bloggers' overuse of parentheses, con and other event organizers inviting original submissions without enough lead time, continuing frustration that so many Twitter users who cross my dashboard don't, to name one of many behaviors, track down original sources before RTing commentary.

This, too, shall pass.

Good things: Friend J. and I attended a book talk and signing with a powerhouse trio: G. Willow Wilson and Helen Oyeyemi interviewed by Kelly Link. It had its moments, but I wish it had gone deeper. The bookstore event organizer and Link both mentioned a conversation the authors had had earlier in the evening, and that sounded better than what we got. By contrast, last night coworker R. and I went to an alternately entertaining and illuminating talk with Werner Herzog, done conversation-style with a classics professor who has collaborated with him on ten films. It ran two hours with Q&A and could have gone longer, as far as we were concerned. Well, not the Q&A part; the questions and "questions" were of that painful sort that come from university students trying to sound smart.

My sister came to town for about 36 hours on her latest gig, with the Russian National Ballet, so disgruntled_owl and I got to hang with her. For those of you who are new here, my sister is basically a freelance tour manager for musicians. My favorite part was when one guy, whose English was better than most of the troupe's, gently teased her in the green room for eating sushi without drinking beer, and then a few minutes later, while watching the evening's performance of Swan Lake, I discovered he played the prince. Having seen the dancers offstage at the hotel and at the mall added a fun layer to the viewing experience: that one over there, she's the one who made an adorable pout when told the venue wifi wasn't working, and those two have just recovered from a bad landing and a fight, respectively…. Also, did you know the ballet has alternate endings? In this version, to the probable benefit of the children in the audience, Rothbart got defeated and Odette and the prince lived happily ever after.

Last and perhaps least, I replaced the living room area rug I'd disliked for five years. Pretty. (Not my apartment.)

Reading: Local friends are wrapping up a March mini-version of our autumn reading challenge. I decided to use the communal motivation to finish some books I was stuck on, plus one I'd had on the shelf for 20 years, A Canticle for Leibowitz. So at least some books made it back to the library completed after the maximum number of renewals and a few cents in fines.

Fanfic-wise, I tried some Star Trek: Discovery fic and have enjoyed this person Alethia's collection of Christopher Pike/Michael Burnham stories, except for one thing. They have excellent banter and good character voices and a variety of simple yet enjoyable premises, but there's little to no attention paid to the incredible breach of protocol inherent in a ship's captain sleeping with a crew member. It's either not mentioned at all, or it's brushed aside in a line or two. For me, that's a big disappointment. Also, the author likes italics more than I like reading them, because you shouldn't have to rely on them to indicate what you want emphasized, and even if they add force and movement to words like thrust in a sex scene, you don't need them multiple times per paragraph. Okay, see above re: being easily annoyed. At least it's not The Magicians, where, I'm told, fandom has decided fic should be written in the style of e.e. cummings.

Watching + Vidding: Ask me about the time I watched an entire TV show for Equinox Exchange after saying it was going to be a low-effort project. That's done now, and over the weekend I returned to a sports movie vid I'd been planning two years ago but set aside when Fandom Trumps Hate came along. It has structure. Structure is my friend. When I'm feeling less despondent I would like to work on the vid I suuuuuper owe deelaundry, as well as other projects recently mentioned here. And, you know, actually finish something.

How are you?

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mid-February mood

2019-02-17T21:33:44Z

Doing

Work has been… not good lately. My boss' boss killed a long-term project of mine at the 11th hour that I was really proud of and looking forward to sharing with people. The nix came out of nowhere and despite approvals by all the other necessary parties, proposed compromises from me and vocal support from the rest of our team. That has taken the wind out of my sails.

I also struggled in the last couple of weeks with a series of decisions that shouldn't have been that hard. Well, I've got issues, but I realized this go-round that it's not all me, it's also other people not accepting a first "no thanks." Plus I think I have to quit my therapist and find someone less frustrating. Or just stop. Perhaps not surprisingly, I've had a strange, pressure-type headache for a week and counting.

However! Summer travel provides something to look forward to. I was approved to attend a conference in Switzerland, whee, and later will be spending a low-key week with some friends on the Cape, where I have never gone despite having lived in Boston for more than 10 years when you add it all together. Grateful to have been invited.

Listening

Achieved my first fannish goal for the year by upgrading to a paid Spotify account. Being able to play music on the TV (via Roku) has made a huge difference in how often I listen, and already the influx of new artists and songs has lifted my spirits and begun to replenish my dwindling collection of viddable music. One song wants to be about The Good Place, even though I had no plans to vid that show.

Watching

Back to usual habits: 26 movies and 3 seasons of television so far this year. No oomph to write reviews, but I'm sure the time and inclination will return at some point.

Some of that TV is a new-to-me 1990s show in case it sparks an idea for equinox_exchange, because our matched fandom isn't working out and I don't know how to do things in half measures. (I talked to my mom about defaulting or phoning something in, and she reminded me that I won't be happy making something I don't like.) There is a movie option, but the right song hasn't presented itself. TBD, I guess.

Funny story about that: One actor struck me as good-looking in atypical way, and when I looked him up I learned he's the son of another actor whose photos I've had on my computer for years because he is also good-looking in an atypical way. Consistent taste is consistent! Now I see the resemblance, although I don't think I would have figured it out on my own, especially since they have different last names. /cryptic

Vidding

1. For stress relief and a friend's birthday, I spent half a day making a vidlet of the best kind: simple, silly and short. Stay tuned.

2. Intermittently editing a Longmire vid that didn't work out for Festivids: Mathias+Walt (or Mathias/Walt), Mathias POV, hopefully funny. Somehow there are zero Mathias/Walt fanworks among the 289 Longmire entries on the AO3, despite the characters having similar jobs and the type of contentious relationship fandom usually loves.

3. Planning deelaundry's auction vid.

Also, trelkez's Self-Curated Vid Show collection went live, in which 31 vidders submitted playlists they constructed from their own vid archives in whatever ways they desired. I've got two playlists in the mix. You can watch them here if you like. I'm looking forward to getting a better sense of people's bodies of work in the coming weeks.

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Status report, early March

2017-03-04T23:48:31Z

Doing

Working a lot at work. Consequently, doing not a lot at home. My proposed promotion is still moving forward, although not approved yet. But I'm sad about feeling vaguely unwell so often. (No advice needed; docs have been consulted.) On the tail end of one of these periodic weeks of poor sleep, I had a gross dream about a manager in the office and had trouble looking at him yesterday. Then today my laptop died! Only I looked up the "symptoms" on my phone and fixed it via a method that indicated it was only an issue of built-up static charge, whew. We had an Arctic front sweep through last night; the same dry air made my lip split when I went to the library this afternoon.

Last weekend featured Boston fan brunch, always good, followed by fangirl movie night at thedeadparrot's, in this case Dune, for which serenadestrong made a spectacular sand worm spice bread. On the downside, a friend moved away to NYC, and the whole weekend felt vaguely unreal because my ear was plugged for uninteresting reasons, so until these drops from CVS cleared it up I was half deaf and felt slightly feverish, maybe because I associate plugged-up ears with being sick.

...This is the kind of post people used to make fun of when they talked about the banality of blogging. I will stop complaining.

Vidding

No, wait, I will complain about one more thing, because it is upsetting me: Last Saturday YouTube blocked the Ancillary Justice trailer in the U.S. and Canada because of the DhakaBrakha audio snippets (although it's still up on Vimeo), and then last night Vimeo took down Starships! because of the Nicki Minaj song (although it's still up on YouTube) -- no warning, just down, with an email explanation of the copyright claim.

Things I have done:
- Emailed the OTW's legal team to see if they have experience helping vidders contest copyright claims for music rather than video clips
- Emailed the Vimeo support team to gripe about the sudden takedown and to request screen shots of the comments and last known view counts
- Asked vidding friends on Twitter for advice
- Added the YouTube link for Starships! to the biggest Tumblr post that's been circulating, although who knows if people will see it
- Begun preparing points to make in the appeals

I believe the book trailer has a better shot of being reinstated because it only uses a small portion of the full song and isn't competing with the original. Starships! I'm not super hopeful about, in the same way I haven't been hopeful about previous copyright matches for vids that got denied upon initial upload, and that sucks, because vids are clearly transformative works and I wish I could articulate how video clips transform the audio (rather than vice versa), or form a gestalt with it that the song wouldn't have done alone.

Meanwhile, I requested a song for Club Vivid and it got approved, although I'm not sure I can make it in time because of the scope of one of my Fandom Trumps Hate auction vids, which I am going to post about soon because I could use your help.

Reading

Those SF/F compendia. Also Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor. I liked Binti a lot and was pleased to learn of the sequel, which was also good, except for how it's a CLIFFHANGER, sigh.

Next up, The Dream-quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, because the Nebula nominees were announced and some of the novellas looked interesting.

Watching

This week I got to see a performance of Tennessee Williams' Night of the Iguana featuring Amanda Plummer and James Earl Jones! More on that later, I think. We do not often get New York-caliber dramas in Boston, so that was a treat.

Also a bunch of random movies that I will not list exhaustively but that included 13th, just as powerful as advertised; some movies my sister and I used to watch all the time as kids but that I hadn't seen since then (Annie [1982] and The Neverending Story); Cloud Atlas, which was terrible in different ways from the book (the racebending makeup was creepy and wrongsighted); and Child 44, an action film that was utterly unremarkable except for its cast: Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Charles Dance, Noomi Rapace, Vincent Cassel and Fares Fares. It took place in Stalin-era Moscow and Volsk so of course they cast Brits, a Frenchman, a Swede and a Lebanese Swede and made them speak in "Russian" accents.

Want to see Get Out and Logan. My sister will be visiting next weekend and we plan to take care of at least one of those.

Listening

Stephen Thompson at NPR released this year's Austin 100, a batch of songs by artists he recommends ahead of SXSW. I usually find a handful of vid songs in these -- among the 2016 recs I found this year's Club Vivid song, the song I used for the Chris Hadfield vid, and the song I'm going to use for the Mary Sue vampire vid -- and am looking forward to this new collection.

Writing

Posts and emails, mostly. Did I mention that over Presidents' weekend I added some pages to some very old Mary Sue fics? It felt good to get words out and to extend those stories a little, even with the inevitable self-criticism over things like "Why did it take you all day to write two pages?" and "Why are you still thinking about teenage fantasies?"

Off to disgruntledowl's for dinner/movie. I made brownies. Before that, I made some mashed cauliflower. The apartment smells very confused.

Hope you are having good weekends.

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Status updates

2015-10-21T01:40:18Z

Fretting: I got some disheartening but not unexpected test results today re: health. Dealing with it properly will involve behavior changes and possibly-temporary pills. I am trying to approach it with a "you can do it" attitude, but it's hard. Dietary advice, for example, is all over the map. I guess we'll see what the nutritionist says at my next appointment.

I also have to figure out what to do about my knee, which has gotten unsteady, probably because I overtaxed it with high-impact activities; and now the issue has traveled up to tighten my hip, which has given me problems before. Perhaps I can find a physical therapist/massage therapist to dig in her elbow. Just, grr. I keep thinking I'm too young to be dealing with these kinds of issues left and right, but here we are, so I guess not. Maybe I'll focus on how the hip helps me empathize with Breq.

Also have been ruminating on how I'm not performing as well in my professional field as I am in fandom, and whether that's a problem, and why ego has to get mixed up in everything. That's a topic for another post.

Going: To DC this weekend for a friend's wedding, and I think it will be just wonderful. Seeing a slew of fan friends and celebrating happiness.

Watching: Whatever season of the Great British Bake-Off/Baking Show they've put up on Netflix. As people have said, it's charming and much more supportive than your typical reality competition. More attention to the craft as well. It's something nice and light to look forward to each evening. And a welcome break from Gilmore Girls. GG is enjoyable but after four seasons in a month it's time to mix things up more.

Vidding: Have four or five back-up ideas for Festivids sources. Do I start to make one before getting an assignment? It seems like something fun to do, but it doesn't seem right to work on an assignment or a treat without first knowing what the recipient is hoping for.

Reading: Finished Step Aside, Pops!, which was fine. I liked "I had fun once and it was awful". Am about 4/5 of the way through Master and Commander; it's funnier but also choppier than expected. Dunno what's next. I sort of petered out on Prydain.

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