dolorosa_12: (babylon berlin dancing feet)
This weekend has been a very welcome chance to catch my breath, after weeks of intense work, travel, and a lingering sense that I'd been trying to cram too many responsibilities into too little time. I feel physically and mentally rested for the first time in ages.

Of course, 'catching my breath' in my context still means that I went out three times to the market in the past two days, plus three times to the gym (or rather, two times to the gym and one time to the cinema which is in the same complex), did two loads of laundry, batch-cooked a bunch of stuff, and spent most of this morning doing little bits and pieces in the garden, so I haven't exactly been spending the weekend lounging around on the couch. I never want inactivity — I just want to feel that all this stuff fits easily into the time I have available.

Yesterday afternoon, Matthias and I did the time-honoured Australian hot weather activity of decamping to the air conditioned comfort of the cinema, and watched Sinners. This is probably the first time in a year I've seen a film in a cinema, and it was well worth it! It's been a while since I've seen a movie that works so perfectly on all levels — narrative, acting, visual and aural storytelling, and the seamless interweaving thereof — and this was an absolute feast for the senses. There's so much going on: it's a story about Black American history, culture, and music, it's about cultural appropriation (particularly of Black music of all genres), and of the tenacity of Black people throughout the entirety of their presence on the American continents in building and creating and clawing their way to success and prosperity in the face of the full force of racism that will impede them every step of the way, and tear down everything they've built whenever possible, with zero consequences. In particular, it's about the immense trauma at the heart of the Black experience in the United States — on both an individual and communal level — of the rupture of slavery, and the way it robbed the descendents of the enslaved of knowledge of their history, and the way that, in spite of that, there is this incredible cultural continuity, particularly when it comes to music, that transcends and survives this traumatic rupture, resulting in this most exquisite music, from whose roots pretty much every popular musical genre has sprung. (And of course, all this exquisite musical talent and innovation has been plundered and whitewashed by non-Black musicians ever since mass entertainment became a thing, a point which the film weaves throughout its narrative.)

It's also a vampire horror movie.

There were some scenes that I can't describe without spoiling what really should be seen unspoilt, but which were so visually striking and emotionally arresting that they took my breath away. The music is incredible, and made me want to dance in the cinema. In other words, I was immersed and entranced, and it took away my cynicism about film as a storytelling medium (which, after a big dose of franchise/reboot/blockbuster fatigue, had been pretty high).

Other than movies, I've been slowly reading through the only kind of reading material I can handle at the moment: Consort of Fire (Kit Rocha), an undemanding, tropey romantasy that feels like the equivalent of junk food for the brain.

Beyond that, it's been a weekend of gardening. Last year, I planted an sweet pea seedling, which grew absolutely gigantic, and was laden with flowers of varying shades of pink and purple. It made me so happy, I was planning to get another seedling this year — until I went out to the vegetable patches and realised I didn't have to, as about five new sweet pea plants had self-seeded from last year's. I spent a bit of time this morning constructing frames from bamboo, and training the new seedlings to the frames so they'll grow upwards. I also planted a bunch of seeds in propagator trays: radishes, chili, spring onion, rocket, dill, parsley, chives, peas, marigolds, and nasturtiums. It really is too late for all this — see above for how rushed and lacking in time I've felt for weeks on end — so I'm philosophical about how successful any of these potential plants is likely to be. If anything sprouts and grows, I'll count that as a success. Benign neglect seems to be the route to success in our garden — without having planted any, we have masses of strawberry plants (including one that self-seeded in the cracks between two paving slabs in the patio), a bunch of supposedly dead foxgloves in the front garden suddenly revived (these are not meant to be perennials) and covered themselves with budding flowers, and the unkillable mint died back as it always did in winter, and sprang to life in spring, filling the entire herb garden. The wood pigeons have, as always, stripped half the leaves and unripe fruit from one of the cherry trees, but in a month or so, there should be a veritable feast of pinkish-white cherries nonetheless.

It's nice to have had a good stretch of time to devote to Dreamwidth this afternoon. I've missed this place.
dolorosa_12: (emily the strange)
In spite of having a fair amount of free time, I've only finished watching three TV shows this month. They were:

  • Interior Chinatown, a humorous, meta miniseries about formulaic, tropey storytelling (in this case, American police procedurals, and East Asian martial arts movies), the rigid boxes into which this places its characters, and real-world individuals, and what might happen when characters try to break free from these constraints. It's written with thoughtfulness and affection, the dialogue and characters are great, but I felt that ten episodes were slightly too many, and I'm not quite sure it stuck the landing.


  • Season 2 of Dark Winds, an atmospheric, noirish mystery series set on a Navajo reservation (and the wider region) in the 1970s. The writing and acting in this is superb — every character is haunted and traumatised in some way, and this is allowed to suffuse with slow subtlety, as viewers are gradually let in on the various secrets. This is a series that is exactly as long as it needs to be — unlike a lot of TV shows, which I find (see above, for example) feel overstretched, Dark Winds needs room to breathe, and uses this slow pace to perfect effect. The dramatic landscape — and the hostility and violence to which it treats its white antagonists, in contrast with its Native characters, for whom its every contour is known and familiar — is almost like another character in the show. This is absolutely exquisite TV, and the only sour note this time around is its cartoonishly grotesque villain (psychosexual issues with his mother, gleefully carnivalesque violence, etc).


  • The final season of What We Do in the Shadows, a comedy mockumentary spinoff of Taika Waititi's comedy mockumentary film about housesharing vampires in New Zealand, about housesharing vampires in Staten Island. There were still some absolutely hilarious moments, and great lines in the script, but I couldn't help but feel that this was dragged on for too long, until it got a bit tired.
  • dolorosa_12: (snow berries)
    This weekend, and my final days of holiday preceding it (plus the first day back at work from home on Friday) have been as relaxing as I'd hoped and planned. I did a couple of swims (and walked back home in bitter cold), some short walks with Matthias along the river, and went out a handful of times to return or collect library books, or for coffee and drinks, but essentially remained in the house, feeling cosy. I made a massive batch of chickpea and vegetable soup, cooked a time-consuming (but straightforward) stodgy Ukrainian vegetable stew, did a lot of yoga, and read a lot of books. Matthias and I also watched the latest Wallace and Gromit film — an amusing (and easter egg-filled) caper involving sentient robotic garden gnomes and a 'car' chase on slow-moving canal houseboats.

    It snowed in the early hours of the morning, but the whole lot had melted by about 10am, and then the torrential rain arrived. It's been nice to sit in the living room, drinking tea, finishing my book, and watching the rain on the window.

    This year's reading is off to a fantastic start: three excellent books, and one excellent novella, each exquisitely good at doing what they're trying to do.

    More thoughts on books behind the cut )

    Tonight will be the last night with the Christmas decorations. Tomorrow, the wreath will come off the door — I'm planning to burn the pine branches and holly in the wood-burning stove, the next time we use it — and our tiny little tree will go back out into the back garden, to be brought in again when it's December once more. The sky is still light at 4pm; the year moves on.
    dolorosa_12: (tea books)
    After the busyness of last weekend (and of the past working week), it was good to spend this weekend doing our more restful, typical activities. I find the fixed schedule — Saturday morning at the bakery at opening time, for pastries and coffee, off to the gym for two hours of classes, meeting Matthias at the market at midday to get the week's vegetables, food truck lunch in the sunshine in the courtyard of our favourite cafe/bar, Sunday morning laps when the pool opens, cooking all the stewed fruit and crepes for breakfast, then books, and Dreamwidth, and yoga — to be incredibly soothing and restorative. It's not super exciting, but the predictability is relaxing.

    This week most of my reading has been rereads. Two of these (Good Man Friday and Crimson Angel) were from Barbara Hambly's 1830s New Orleans Benjamin January mystery series, which took the titular protagonist to Washington DC and Cuba and Haiti respectively; as always, the draw for me is the recreated historical world, and the sense of building family and community in the margins of monstrous, dystopian injustice, the beauty fiercer because it's pushing back against incredible danger and cruelty. I also reread A Gladiator Dies Only Once, the second short story collection in Steven Saylor's ancient Roman historical mystery series. These were all a lot of fun — the title story in the collection in particular — and gave Saylor a chance to explore little fragments of Roman history and culture (garum production! pet ownership! etc) for which he never found space in the full-length novels. Now only one book in the series remains, and it's one I've never read, since it was published after I stopped keeping track of Saylor's output. I'm hoping I can get a secondhand copy.

    In new-to-me historical mystery series, I also read The Angsana Tree Mystery, the latest in Ovidia Yu's 1940s Singapore series. This one is set in 1949, and involves, as alway,s a case which hinges on family secrets and money. While I appreciated a lot of the familiar elements (the food descriptions, the narrator Su Lin's messy extended family, the multicultural cast of locals who are always much cleverer than the British colonial administration), I felt that it got bogged down in an unnecessary amount of soap operatic interpersonal drama in a way that felt untrue to the characters, making it weaker than previous books in the series.

    Then I reread Mind's Eye, a short story collection by Australian children's author Jackie French. The stories are concerned with French's main preoccupations — the Australian landscape, particularly the bush, and rural areas, recent Australian history, and the ways these things interact with, and find echoes in, then-contemporary (1990s) Australia. They still hold up very well, although there's a kind of uncritical lauding of rural (white) Australians as living a more authentic kind of Australianness which really wouldn't fly today. I am a city dweller to my bones, and have been all my life, and I remember reading these stories as a child, and feeling that the world they depicted was as exotic to me, and equally outside my own experiences, as something on the other side of the globe, even though it existed merely a hundred or so kilometres away.

    I spent an hour or so after lunch today curled up on the couch reading Bitter Waters, a novella in Vivian Shaw's Greta Helsing series, in which all the fictional vampires of nineteenth-century novels are real, living scattered around the UK, cared for by the title character (a descendent of Stoker's Van Helsing, who works as a GP specialising in supernatural beings) and getting swept up in various unlife-threatening dramas. The novella is a great deal of fun — the sort of thing I describe as authors writing fanfic of their own characters, which seems to happen a lot in SFF novellas these days — and is probably best described as vampire domestic fluff. My only gripe is something that I've found a minor irritant about the series since the beginning, which is that it's set in Britain, but really obviously written by an American, in wildly jarring ways. This time, it was a couple of really glaring instances of US English in the mouths of British characters ('takeout' and 'math class'), which, for an author who makes much of the fact that she spent a portion of her childhood living in the UK, really shouldn't be there.

    All in all, it's been a weekend of cosy domesticity, and that's been reflected in my reading choices.
    dolorosa_12: (babylon berlin charlotte)
    My weekend started (on Friday evening) meeting Matthias at his workplace in Keir Starmer's constituency, moving on for dinner and a concert (on which more later) in Jeremy Corbyn's constituency, then sleeping overnight in a hotel in Diane Abbott's constituency: the peak north London experience.

    Dinner was a bunch of Malaysian starters at the always excellent [instagram.com profile] sambalshiok, but we weren't able to linger, because we had to head down the road to a tiny (but cavernously ceilinged) venue for the gig. Uncharacteristically, we were there for the support acts — [instagram.com profile] nnhmn_ and [instagram.com profile] minuitmachine — and hadn't even heard of the main event, [instagram.com profile] rebekawarrior. The former are female-fronted dark electro acts, the later a dark electro dj (and by the time we got to her set, I was astonished that I'd never heard of her), we danced our delighted, exhausted hearts out, and a fabulous time was had by all. We made our way into the night, and back to our hotel via the overground, and collapsed into sleep.

    Saturday dawned cold and cloudy, and I was able at last to try the pastries at [instagram.com profile] pophamsbakery for breakfast — a patisserie I've long been following on social media — and was pleased to discover that they lived up to the hype. We finished our 36 hours in London up with a visit to the British Library, to see their exhibition on Black British music (from Tudor times to the present), which I highly recommend. It's always a bit tricky to do a physical exhibition on a topic that relies so heavily on aural experiences, but they did a good job of telling this complex story. It would have been great if there had been a way to accompany the exhibition with a multipart documentary, just so that the music could have told more of its own story in sound, but I enjoyed things all the same.

    After the exhibition, and a quick lunch, we headed back to Ely on the train, and had a lazy Saturday afternoon and evening at home.

    Today has also been fairly lazy (apart from both of us doing a bunch of household chores) — slow cooking, slow yoga, lying around reading (Elusive, the second book in Genevieve Cogman's published self-insert Scarlet Pimpernel vampire AU trilogy, which was as swashbuckling good fun as the previous book, with the same reluctance to examine the inherent flaws of the source material's premise while adopting a smugly self-congratulatory assumption of having done so), and restoring energy before the advent of the next working week. I'm severely behind on Dreamwidth, but I'm going to do my best to catch up on my reading page before I go to bed tonight.

    I hope everyone's had lovely weekends.
    dolorosa_12: (babylon berlin charlotte)
    I'm writing my usual weekend post today, instead of Sunday, because I'm likely to be too busy and tired to write anything substantial tomorrow, for reasons that will soon become apparent. This weekend is an unusually busy one for me, after an uncharacteristically tiring work week, and I feel as if I've barely had time to catch a breath.

    Last night, Matthias and I went to an '80s silent disco in the cathedral. We'd done something similar nine months ago (that was a '90s music silent disco though), and enjoyed thing so much we were very happy to go again, and spent a delightful three hours dancing to (and screaming along with the lyrics of) three hours' worth of '80s cheese. As before, the headsets came with three channels, one per dj — broadly separated into rock, pop, and hip hop — and a good time was had by all. I always feel a bit weird about these events being held in a beautiful, massive medieval cathedral that is still a house of worship (they sell alcohol, etc), but since I'm not a Christian it's not really my call. There's going to be a follow-up event in September with '80s, '90s and noughties music, and I'll definitely go to that.

    We were supposed to be heading into London today (via a very convoluted, time-consuming route due to trackwork on the railway line) for a gig — Swedish industrial electro singer Rein — but last night we were notified that the concert was postponed, which to be honest was a bit of a relief, since going from the silent disco one night to live music the next followed by a tiring Sunday is too much for me these days. We saw Rein live in the same venue five years ago — a tiny nightclub inside a former industrial warehouse in Islington — and hopefully we'll be able to see her again at a rescheduled event later in the year.

    So instead my Saturday has been a bit more low-key: I cleaned the garden furniture and outdoor windowsills, I went into the market to shop for fruit and vegetables, and I lay around in bed finishing off a book. Now I'm cooking risotto and pottering around on Dreamwidth, and feel a bit more recharged.

    Tomorrow, Matthias and I are heading off on another walk with our friends and their walking group, who generally do a hike in a different place once a month. We've only been to two walks with them so far, and have enjoyed it a lot. It's not particularly strenuous, since everything is local (and the landscape here is extremely flat) and the group tends to walk slowly and stop a lot, but it's nice to be outdoors and doing things with other people, and I always feel great afterwards.

    I've finished one book so far this weekend: Scarlet (Genevieve Cogman), which was undemanding and silly. I admire the author's chutzpah in writing the vampire AU, Mary Sue Scarlet Pimpernel fanfic of her wildest dreams, and then getting Tor to publish it. That description really does sum the book up — the author is clearly having a great time, and as long as you're prepared to switch off your brain in relation to some of the more ludicrous elements (and to the fact that Cogman clearly thinks she's critiquing some of the issues inherent in the premise of her book's source material, when she really only does so in a halfhearted way), it's quite a lot of fun.

    Finally, a couple of links:

    As is often the case, Marie Le Conte's recent post about being an immigrant really spoke to me.

    Perhaps most importantly, “roots” can mean different things to different people. Some trees will have few of them but they will burrow deep into the soil to find what they need. Others will stay near the surface but spread and spread. Everyone does what they can, and as they must, in order to keep going.

    Insinuating that people who have moved around a lot have less interest in sincere human connection and the places they live in is both offensive and missing the mark entirely. I couldn’t pretend to speak for everyone whose life has been similar to mine, of course, but I’d argue it’s the opposite.


    'Live your life so that the good folks at Bellingcat won't have cause to spend a lot of effort geolocating you through photos of the reflection of the back of your head in hospitality venues' social media posts' would seem to me to be a sensible admonition. I mean, on the one hand I admire the work Bellingcat does immensely ... and on the other, it's kind of terrifying.

    And on that note, I will draw this post to a close, and go and check on my risotto.
    dolorosa_12: (autumn tea)
    I've been really sick for the past few days, and have essentially spent all of today in bed up until now. I'm exhausted, my bones ache, and all I really want to do is sleep. I've cancelled everything non-essential, but I could definitely have done without being sick right at this specific moment.

    In better news, I received a late gift for [community profile] fandomtrees after the fest closed: this fic based on Welsh folklore/mythology by [personal profile] kalloway. That was definitely a lovely and welcome surprise!

    One fest closes, another is opening tomorrow: [community profile] halfamoon, which is a fest focusing on female characters. The full list of prompts is already available.

    [community profile] once_upon_fic is now open for nominations, with details and the full schedule available in a recent post.

    [community profile] snowflake_challenge is doing its post-challenge friending meme. Click on the poster to join in:

    Snowflake Challenge Friending Meme promotional banner featuring a book and an apple on a board with a blanket peeking out and ice crystal snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge Friending Meme.


    It seems a waste to write a (rare) post on a Wednesday and not talk about my recent reading, which consists of a single book: Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco. This is in some ways the vampire novel of my dreams — when I'm seeking out stories about vampires, this is essentially exactly what I want. Our hero, Remy, is a vampire hunter in a world in which aristocratic families of vampire hunters coexist uneasily in alliances with aristocratic kingdoms of vampires, teaming up against the unspecified threat both of rogue, unaligned gangs of newly-turned vampires, and more established vampire kingdoms.

    Remy's backstory piles on the angst — there's a cloud surrounding the circumstances of his birth (which killed his mother), his father treats him as a weapon to be wielded, the other vampire hunters either distrust or use him, etc, etc. Through an escalating series of dangerous circumstances, Remy ends up working with a powerful vampire couple, he ends up falling in love with both of them (and they with him), and a good time is had by all, against a backdrop of epic battles, political machinations, and huge heapings of angst. The worldbuilding is contradictory and at times nonsensical, but that doesn't really matter to me since the draw of the book is the characters and their relationships, which are very much my thing.

    If that were all I had to say about the book, I would have given it an enthusiastic five-star rating and moved on (since I give that kind of rating on the basis of how well I think a book has achieved what it set out to achieve, rather than any objective scale of 'good quality literature'). However, it has serious problems on a copyediting level, to the extent that at times I wondered if it had even been professionally edited at all. This is a book professionally published by Hodder & Stoughton — hardly a dinky little small press — the sequel is coming out later this year, and yet there are multiple instances of tense changes not just from sentence to sentence, but sometimes within a single sentence.

    This is not the first time I've noticed serious problems with editing (either on the level of copyediting/proofreading, or on the level of the actual structure and content of the book) in professionally published works of fiction, and I'm definitely not the only one to have raised it within my Dreamwidth circle. Without knowing the ins and outs of the publishing industry, my impression is of an industry cut to the bone, with the effects of these cuts and lack of resources starting to be felt in areas that are noticeable to the reader — namely, editing (or lack thereof). My assumption (and this is just a theory; I don't work in publishing) is that it is more cost effective to do book deals with a large number of authors (often with quite low advances), larger than the publisher has the capacity (both financially and in terms of staffing) to edit well, and get all those books out there and published. More books, bought cheaply from more authors, means the potential for more sales, and most readers of these books aren't going to notice or care about poor quality editorial work — and those of us who do have already bought the books, have already given our money, and aren't necessarily going to remember the typos and grammatical errors by the time we attempt to buy another book from the same author or publisher. As I say, just a theory, but whatever the cause, this poor quality editing is something I've noticed frequently, and it's a shame it affected this book as well.
    dolorosa_12: (amelie wondering)
    Until [community profile] snowflake_challenge is over, I'm going to piggyback on their prompts and use them for my own each Friday. Today's prompt is:

    Choose Your Challenge: we will give you the challenge of making a list (who doesn't love lists?!?) and then you get to choose what list to make.

    Five Things! The five things are totally up to you.


    Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring  an image of a coffee cup and saucer on a sheet with a blanket and baby’s breath and a layer of snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

    I can never resist making a 'five things' list into a 'five times she did, and one time she didn't' list, so that's what I've done here. Feel free to use my own list topic, or make your own 5 (+1) things list in the comments.

    Five TV shows perfect after just one season, and one cancelled before its time )
    dolorosa_12: (winter tree)
    Happy New Year to everyone! Matthias and I saw out 2023 in our usual way — with canapes, champagne, and films at home, and it was cheerful and relaxing and cosy. I wasn't quite intending to wake up at 7am, but in the end it was nice to be up and about in the very first sliver of the morning, drinking tea, eating a cooked breakfast, and chatting about which books with which we planned to start our 2024 reading. We then went out for a looping, 5km walk along the river and through the sleepy suburban streets, and back — via the coffee rig in the market square — past the cathedral, drenched in silvery sunlight, watching the canal boats and swans drift by. Here's a little photoset of the transition from one year to the next.

    It being 1st January means two things: Yuletide reveals, and the start of [community profile] snowflake_challenge. I'm planning to participate in a low key way in the challenge this year: I'll do all the prompts, but I'm not going to link them in the comm. I know this goes somewhat against the spirit of the thing, but I found dealing with the increased replies overwhelming at times last year, and this feels like a compromise that will keep things manageable. But more on Snowflake later: let's get to the Yuletide recs!

    I only make rec posts for the exchange once authors have been revealed, because it feels unfair to share all these things I've enjoyed without the authors getting credit, hence why I always wait until 1st January. I'm pleased to see that several of my favourite fics that I'm reccing from this year's collection are written by friends!

    Nine recs behind the cut — mainly book fandoms )

    I wrote four fics this year — my main assignment, two treats in the main collection, and one treat in the Madness collection, which seem to have been well received, so from my perspective, this has been a good Yuletide all around: a great gift, a good reception for my own writing, and a collection with some fantastic pieces of work.

    My four fics behind the cut )

    Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of horse drawn red coach in snowfall. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

    Today's prompt is:

    In your own space, update your fandom information.

    My intro post remains up to date, which is pleasing. Something which I had been intending to do for last year's challenge, but which never happened, was writing a template post for fanwork exchange letters, with prompts for all the fandoms I'm likely to request. The idea was that this would save me time and avoid the need to go trawling back through multiple previous letters. I can obviously update it with new fandoms if I decide to request them. I'm really happy that the template letter post is all set up — it should save me a huge amount of time in the future.

    And that's [community profile] snowflake_challenge Day 1 completed!
    dolorosa_12: (amelie wondering)
    We only finished two TV shows in October, so I decided to roll them into November's log, and then we only finished the last November show on 30th. As a result, I'm writing this post in December, which is not normally how I like this stuff to be done! Nevertheless, the post — though late — is here. We finished six shows (or individual seasons of shows) in the past two months, which are as follows:

  • Lidia Poët, a historical drama about the first woman to receive a law degree and practice law in Italy. This is, shall we say, very Italian — everyone is ridiculously beautiful, everything is incredibly melodramatic — and presumably quite changed from the actual experiences of the real 19th-century Lidia Poët. But if you want a fluffy, case-of-the-week show in which a feisty, relentless woman fights institutional sexism against a soapy backdrop of romantic entanglements and family conflicts, this is the show for you.


  • Reservation Dogs, a show about Native American teenagers living their lives on the titular reservation, struggling with the past and present, and dreaming about the future. The tone is surreal and comedic, but there are some pretty heavy themes here, and although I find it life-affirming due to the love all the characters have for each other and the sense of community spirit, I wouldn't say it's a happy show. The writing is sharp, the young actors are fantastic, but don't go in expecting a gentle comedy.


  • What We Do In the Shadows, the most recent season of the mockumentary about vampire housemates living in a sharehouse in Staten Island. This is more what I'd recommend if you're wanting low-stakes comedy. At this point, I'm not sure I have much more to say about the show — it's still fun, and can obviously be spun out indefinitely, although whether that should happen is another question entirely.


  • The Newsreader, an Australian drama about a fictional TV newsroom in the 1980s. I absolutely loved the first season of this show, and would recommend it unreservedly to anyone feeling the loss of The Hour, another historical drama that weaves real-world moments in current affairs with the interpersonal stories of its fictional characters. The Newsreader had an added charm for me in that both of my parents were Australian journalists — my father as one of the country's best-known TV political correspondents for over twenty years, including in the time period covered by the show — and a lot of it rings incredibly true to the point of being too close to home! However, I feel that in the second season the balance between real-world Australian current affairs and the struggle to report TV news shows thereof, and the characters' soap operatic lives, is no longer right — by the end of the show, the emphasis was very much on the latter, which was not to my liking.


  • The Great, an irreverent and smutty black comedy about the reign of Catherine the Great. I enjoyed this a lot in the initial seasons, and the chemistry between the two leads, and many of the actors playing secondary characters, was excellent and carried what would otherwise be quite a one-note story, but I have to say that I think it ended at the right time — on a high. I also feel that by the end it was hard for me to feel enthusiastic about a show whose premise was essentially 'Russians are so violent and imperialistic, hahaha!'


  • Lupin, on the other hand, has been cruelly cancelled before its time. The third season remained its usual delightful self — with its protagonist 'gentleman thief' engaging in every more audacious and absurd heists and trickery — but the stakes were much higher (essentially the safety of Assane's entire family depended on his ability to pull off these various heists), and caused temporary ruptures in a lot of the show's key relationships, so there was much less of a sense of play than had been present in previous seasons. The show ended on a cliffhanger and then was cancelled by Netflix, which is incredibly disappointing.


  • And those are the TV shows I've seen over the past two months. Did any of you watch any of these?
    dolorosa_12: (amelie wondering)
    This post is a couple of days late, due to the incredibly busy weekend I've been having (of which more in a later post). We finished watching five TV shows this month. All were excellent, although I'd have to say that some of them ruined things somewhat by very disatisfying endings. The shows in question were:

  • Blue Lights, a contemporary crime drama set in Belfast, following a number of new police recruits as they undergo their training and become caught up in trying to solve a high-profile case involving organised crime. It's a good social portrait of Northern Ireland in general, and Belfast in particular.


  • Interview with the Vampire, an adaptation (part of) the first book in Anne Rice's series. I came to the books at exactly the right age and demeaner — eighteen years old, and very melodramatic — and loved them a lot during the time I read them. The changes the showrunners made from the books in terms of Louis's backstory and ethnicity work really well, and serve to even better emphasise the unequal, messed up, codependent relationship between Lestat and Louis, and later Lestat, Louis and Claudia. I'm less convinced that the changes made to the timeframe — pushing everything forward in time from the mid-1800s to the early twentieth century — works well, although I assume it was necessary if the show wanted Louis to be Black, but to have been born free rather than enslaved. In any case, the show hit exactly the right tone — the same purple prose, the same self-absorbed melodrama, the same lurid excess, and is to my mind a fantastic adaptation.


  • Daisy Jones and the Six, another adaptation from a book, and another story about self-destructive codependent relationships. This is the story about the titular band, and Daisy Jones, a singer who joins them later, and their journey as they make it big as rock stars in the 1970s. The cast in this is fabulous, the songs are great (and are sung and performed by the actors), and it's thoughtfully done portrait of a very specific time and place, and of the beauty that can be created by incredibly damaged people, and the damage that they can do to themselves and each other. The one sour note is the show's ending, which pulls the rug out from under the viewer in terms of the frame narrative (of a retrospective series of interviews for a documentary about the band) in a way that I found sentimental and unsatisfying.


  • Infiniti, a French drama about astronauts travelling to the International Space Station, and a strange series of murders taking place in Baikonur (the city in Kazakhstan that is home to the Cosmodrome spaceport from which Russian- and international-crewed human space flights were launched until very recently). I really liked the portrayal of space flight (although I had to switch off the part of my brain that knew no country's space program would send such psychologically unstable people as the show's characters into space), life in Kazakhstan, and the weird social and political tensions that come from the region's Soviet legacy, and the Cosmodrome's weird political status as an entity on Kazakh territory, but leased to Russia until 2050. However, I wished that the show had stayed in the realms of crime drama and geopolitical thriller, whereas instead spoilers ) Other than that, a very good show, and I enjoyed its multilingualism.


  • Count Abdullah, another comedy from the same writers who brought us We Are Lady Parts. In this show, a young NHS doctor of British Pakistani descent ends up transformed into a vampire, making his already complicated and stressful life even more complicated and stressful. As with We Are Lady Parts, this is a comedy about British Muslim life made by people from that community, and I found it laugh-out-loud hilarious.


  • June was definitely a high point in terms of TV shows, that's for sure!
    dolorosa_12: (tscc)
    Today's post is going to be a quick one — just answering the current [community profile] snowflake_challenge prompt, which is: In your own space, rec three fanworks that you did not create.

    Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of three snowmen and two robins with snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

    I'm going to use this post to rec three of my favourite fanvids of all time. By way of preamble, I'll clarify a couple of things relating to how I define 'favourite.' Firstly, I'm not an avid consumer of fanvids, and far less a creator (as I said in a previous post, any kind of fanwork involving graphics is basically like witchcraft to me) — I tend to engage with fanvids when someone I know has either a) created or recced a fanvid and b) it's in a fandom with which I'm familiar, so my engagement is somewhat haphazard. I have pretty clear things that I look for in a fanvid: I have to like the music, I have to feel that it fits well with the focal character(s) and the story being told in the vid (or is so outrageously incongruous that that's basically the point), and the editing has to be smooth enough that errors are unnoticable to my untrained eye. I also personally dislike fanvids that have dialogue from the source spliced into the video — I want it to tell a complete story with music and images, without needing source dialogue as a scaffold.

    There are some well-known, beloved fanvids that get recced to everyone wanting to know the greatest hits of the medium, and I like them a lot, but I've steered clear of them here as most people will have had them recced before.

    With that in mind, here is my totally biased, subjective, created-from-a-place-of-complete-ignorance list of favourite three fanvids:

    Vid recs )

    Do you have any particular things you like in fanvids? Do you have any particular favourites?
    dolorosa_12: (sister finland)
    Miracle of miracles, I have the time and energy to do some book-logging on an actual Wednesday for once!

    After the poll on my last post, I ended up reading The Hellebore Guide to Occult Britain. The book was a lot of fun — it reminded me of the folklore encyclopedias I used to read as a child — moving around Britain and Northern Ireland, cataloguing various myths and legends associated with landmarks and other notable places. There were a lot of commonalities from region to region — standing stones and Neolithic tombs, portals to fairy otherworlds, supernatural dogs, various local people said to have made pacts with the Devil, witch trials, haunted manor houses and so on. It's history as written into the land, and as understood by people who didn't read, and who didn't travel widely — local history that recognises the priorities of such people.

    I did think it was a bit cheeky to bill the book as a guide to Britain, and then devote 3/4 of the book to England, and the remaining 1/4 to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (the latter of which isn't even in Britain), though!

    I continued my habit of reading short fiction during my lunchbreak in the office yesterday — just one story this time:

    'Time: Marked and Mended' (Carrie Vaughn): Graff isn’t quite human. His people move through the galaxy collecting memories and experiences, recording their lives and passing them on. Then, one day, he breaks: he discovers a chunk of his memory is missing. This should be impossible—he’s never forgotten a moment in his life. Now, he has to learn to forget, and to remember, and this has consequences for all his people, his culture, and his whole world.

    Matthias and I saw two films on the weekend, both of which had relationships between fathers and daughters at their heart, although there the similarities ended.

    Troll is a deeply silly Norwegian film in which roadworks through a mountain awaken an ancient troll from its slumber, at which point it starts roaming the land and terrorising the people. An archaeologist and her folklorist father get roped into the government's response, and wacky scenarios ensue. If you saw the earlier Troll Hunter film, it has a similar vibe.

    Aftersun is a meandering, melancholy film in which a father and his eleven-year-old daughter go on holiday in the 1990s to a beach resort in Turkey, and not much else happens. Piece by piece, their history and relationship get fleshed out in all their complicated, messy detail — it's clear that the father became a parent very young, that he is no longer together with the girl's mother (and possibly never was), and that he is having a difficult time. The girl, on the other hand, is poised on the threshold of adolescence and is equal parts curious, scared, and confused about what this might entail. What this film is about will depend on which character you believe is the protagnist — I have firm opinions about this, but it's the sort of thing that is better to work out on your own. It's got minimal dialogue, and the two actors work very well together.

    On to yesterday's [community profile] snowflake_challenge: In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, time you spent in the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.

    Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring  an image of a coffee cup and saucer on a sheet with a blanket and baby’s breath and a layer of snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

    I am really pleased at the reception of one of my four Yuletide fics from 2022, and at myself for pushing through and writing it. I've been participating in Yuletide for many years, and every year up to 2021, I wrote multiple treats in addition to my assigned gift. It was important to me to do this — I needed to feel as if I was putting in more to the exchange than I would necessarily get back, and I myself would be delighted to get additional treats so I wanted to give other exchange participants that opportunity. When 2021 rolled around, I was so burned out that I was only able to write my main assignment, and while this of course is the sole requirement of the exchange, I felt like I wasn't meeting the standards I set myself in terms of number of treats.

    So I was relieved in 2022 to have my energy and inspiration return to me, meaning I was able to write three treats in addition to my main assignment. The last of these treats was one I wasn't sure I'd have the time and energy to do justice, but it ended up being the best received, which was a wonderful feeling, and a reminder that my own feelings of doubt should normally be ignored in these sorts of situations. This is the fic in question:

    This marigold run (3037 words) by Dolorosa
    Chapters: 1/1
    Fandom: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
    Rating: General Audiences
    Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
    Characters: Rae "Sunshine" Seddon, Constantine (Sunshine), Yolande (Sunshine)
    Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, 5+1 Things
    Summary:

    Five times Con gave Sunshine an object of power, and one time she returned the favour.



    The level of engagement is obviously not huge if you're used to writing for megafandoms, but I only write for small book fandoms, and by those standards, this fic is doing well! (Especially considering it's for a book that was published in 2003, is standalone so will never get new installments, and generally only gets remembered around Yuletide.) Its reception made me really happy, and was a great note on which to end the fannish year and carry me through into 2023.
    dolorosa_12: (yuletide stars)
    Yuletide was a bit of a weird one for me this year, for reasons I've explained in other posts.

    My gift itself was wonderful — a really good character study of Ban from The Queens of Innis Lear (Tessa Gratton) that dug into a lot of things I particularly enjoy seeing explored in fiction: travel causing people to shed their skin and come to a greater understanding of themselves, bittersweet relationships, and an emphasis on the sky and the natural world.

    guiding star (1306 words) by liesmyth
    Chapters: 1/1
    Fandom: The Queens of Innis Lear - Tessa Gratton
    Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
    Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
    Characters: Ban the Fox (The Queens of Innis Lear)
    Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Self-Discovery, mentions of Ban/Elia
    Summary:

    Sometimes a prophecy can be a compass, not a chain.



    What I wrote )

    What did you write and receive? Is there anything you particularly enjoyed in the collection?
    dolorosa_12: (fever ray)
    I've got salted caramel fudge from the Christmas market, and a cup of smokey tea, and it's been a very satisfying weekend.

    I've spent much of my time doing nothing but writing — I've now got a complete draft of my Yuletide assignment fic, which I'm going to sit on for a couple of days before getting stuck into editing. At this point, therefore, it looks likely that I'll be able to complete at least two of the three treats I've been planning since I first browsed the letters app.

    I also finally broke my reading drought with House of Hunger (Alexis Henderson), a melodramatic gothic novel loosely drawn from the real-world historical figure of Elizabeth Báthory. (When I say 'loosely,' I mean that the setting has been changed from early modern Hungary to a sort of featureless generic industrial fantasylandia, and that all nobility in the world are literal vampires, with an entire social ecosystem of exploitation set up to meet their need for blood.) It was exactly the ludicrous sort of thing I wanted to read on a cold, dark November afternoon, so it suited me perfectly.

    I know I promised a roundup of links to all the various new newsletters to which I have subscribed, but it's going to have to wait. I have, however, put together something of a linkpost, as my number of currently open tabs really needs to decrease!

    I've heard that some people have fled Twitter for Dreamwidth, and, as always, there's a lot of (hopefully) helpful advice floating around about how to get the most out of our little community here:

    Via several people in my circle, [personal profile] galadhir's post about how to get established on Dreamwidth, and a Twitter exodus friending meme hosted by [personal profile] xancredible.

    I enjoyed this interview with Ada Palmer — it teased out some interesting elements about the Terra Ignota series, and the things that motivate and intrigue Palmer as a writer, academic, reader and fan. (It also unintentionally reinforced several of my frustrations with the Utopians in the Terra Ignota series — or perhaps more specifically the reception of them by readers — but that's nothing new.)

    The [community profile] fandomtrees fest is happening again this year, with signups running until 7th December. If you want a fairly low pressure fanworks fest, I'd highly recommend it, and you've still got a few weeks before making a firm decision.

    One of the newsletters to which I recently subscribed was Griefbacon, on the recommendation of Amal El-Mohtar. The most recent post (issue?), An Incomplete List of Things That Twitter Was showed me that I had made the right decision. I can't relate to a lot of the specifics listed in the post, but the overall sentiment resonates.

    I really enjoyed this collection of Hebrew and Arabic poems by Jewish women living in Al Andalus (note that they appear at the second half of a longer newsletter post; the first half is all about reproductive rights in the United States, so if you prefer not to read about that, you'll need to scroll down to the second half of the page)

    My mum sent me this incredible video of a huge hailstorm in Sydney, in slow motion.

    My stocks of both links and fudge are running low, so I'll leave things here, finishing my tea and watching the birds flitting around the back garden.
    dolorosa_12: (emily the strange)
    We spent a lot of this month travelling, so unsurprisingly I've not finished a huge number of TV shows. The ones I did watch were a good mixture of genres. They are as follows:

  • The Newsreader, an Australian miniseries about a fictional TV news show in the 1980s, structured around big breaking news stories of the period (the Lindy Chamberlain case, the royal wedding of Charles and Diana, and so on). It was an interesting snapshot of a time and place, with a great cast. I'm the daughter of two Australian journalists (one of whom worked for over forty years in TV news), and most of their social circle is other Australian journalists, and I'd say the series rang true for the most part. Neither of my parents ever worked for commercial news, though, so perhaps the things that seemed glaringly off were more accurate to that kind of broadcast network. In any case, I'm looking forward to the next season.


  • Miss Scarlet and the Duke, a lighthearted mystery series about a Victorian lady detective solving crimes in London, returned for the second season. This is a pretty undemanding show — the mysteries aren't particularly complex or twisty, the Victorian setting jumps from trope to trope, and the titular characters (the lady detective and her childhood friend in the police force) bicker and flirt — but it's nice when you want the TV equivalent of a bag of sweets.


  • Becoming Elizabeth is a historical drama about the Tudor royal family, focusing on Elizabeth's youth. I'm generally a bit Tudored out when it comes to British historical drama, but it turns out that if the show is set in a less saturated time period (the years between Henry VIII's death and Elizabeth's accession to the throne; currently it's covered the period of her younger half-brother Edward VI's rule) I'll happily watch it. The show is definitely going for a Game of Thrones vibe (sex, violence, lots of betrayal), but that's certainly in keeping with the turbulent times it covers. I feel for once that it also portrays people's relationships with religion during this period in an interesting and realistic way — some people's religious feelings are sincere and deeply felt, others are using religion as a source of power, others out of a sense of expediency — and a deep sense of tension and unease as a result of religious upheavals runs through the whole show. It's beautifully shot in an almost painterly way, and in general is just gorgeous to look at. My only quibble would be the interpretation it puts on some events and character motivations.


  • First Kill is a deeply silly Netflix show that is right up my alley: a forbidden romance between a teenage vampire and a teenage vampire hunter, both of whom are girls, unfolding with soap operatic levels of drama. What can I say — I just love vampires? This has sadly already been cancelled after a single season (which inevitably ended on a cliffhanger.


  • I didn't grow up with Star Trek, nor have I watched much of it, so I don't know enough to have strong opinions about any series. However, I've been enjoying Strange New Worlds a lot: meandering, episodic, case-of-the-week stuff, with just enough multi-episode character development to keep you caring and watching. Genuine Trek fans will no doubt have more to say about the show, but for my part I just think it's fun.


  • On the other hand, I am a fan of The Sandman comics, and knew that there was a lot of pressure on the Netflix adaptation to do right by the beloved source material. From my perspective, the show was equal to the task: a great cast, a thoughtful translation of the material from page to screen, and just enough tweaks to make something which felt groundbreaking in the 1980s/90s feel similarly in the twenty-first century. I loved that it was given the breathing space to unfold in a leisurely way, and I loved the sense of obvious care with which it had been made. I personally would have preferred it to have kept its original time period (rather than taking place for the most part in our own current time), but that's really my only complaint.


  • Having written all that out, it now feels as if I've watched more than I thought when starting this post!
    dolorosa_12: (man ray)
    'And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved.'

    As with many people who loved the writing of Anne Rice, her books came to me at a time in my life when I was really struggling, and her loquacious, histrionic vampires spoke to me, and helped me keep going. Her writing meant a lot to me when I was a young adult, and I can still quote whole passages from memory.

    I have a great deal of affection for the time I first devoured her books, over a period of about three weeks, when I believe I trekked out to every single branch of the City of Sydney public libraries, tracking down each extant copy of the then ten-book Vampire Chronicles series. (I read so quickly as an eighteen-year-old that waiting for holds to be delivered to my local branch would have taken longer than simply walking to Newtown, Glebe, Ultimo, Waterloo, etc, picking up the book, and reading it in a couple of hours.)

    She always seemed as immortal as her creations. From what I could tell, hers was a life of deep griefs, and — for better or fanfic-banning, negative-reviewer-berating worse — intense emotions, lived to its vibrant fullest. Although I hadn't read any of her books for years, I continued to admire (and boggle at) her give-no-fucks attitude, and her wholehearted commitment to living every moment of her life entirely on her own terms. She must have been exhausting to work with, to be close to, but she always seemed to be having the time of her life.

    May her words remain immortal, continuing to to speak to the hearts of every vampire-loving, melodramatic teenager.
    dolorosa_12: (fever ray)
    It's been a fairly quiet weekend, although Matthias and I did make it out of the house on Saturday, spending the afternoon sitting in the beautiful courtyard garden of my favourite cafe/bar in town. We met up with [personal profile] notasapleasure and her husband, who brought homemade Georgian food (the bar doesn't do food, but lets you bring your own stuff), and their gigantic greyhound, who spent most of the time napping in the shade. [personal profile] notasapleasure also introduced me to the delight which is the Ukrainian Eurovision band's singer's Instagram account, which is exactly as you'd imagine. So many people in fandom came away from this year's Eurovision as devoted Måneskin fans, but I'm all about Ukrainian Trinity-from-The Matrix and her giant eagles.

    It's been bakingly hot by UK standards, and I haven't done much more than read: Murder in July (the fourteenth Benjamin January mystery, which involved events from Ben's past in Paris, and many cameos by Ayasha, which I always enjoy), and A Dowry of Blood by ST Gibson (gothic novella from the perspective of one of Dracula's 'brides', written in an almost epistolary style; suffers a bit from really poor copyediting).

    I'll leave you with a link that may be of relevance to UK-based people, via [community profile] thissterlingcrew: how to opt out of the NHS sharing your health data with third parties. Two things to note: there is a deadline of 23rd June to opt out of this, and it appears so far only to cover NHS patients in England, not the other nations (that said, if, for example, you currently live in Scotland but lived and saw a GP in England in the past, you may want to check if your old health data from that time would be included — better to be safe than sorry).
    dolorosa_12: (sunflowers)
    Today I ended up having to teach two classes, even though I'm still on holiday, but it only took up two hours of the day and I don't mind too much. It's grim and grey, and the idea of leaving the house was not hugely appealling.

    Today's book meme asks for:

    9. A book that reminds you of someone

    My answer )

    The other days )
    dolorosa_12: (grimes janelle)
    The Easter weekend drifts on by. Today began lazily (I didn't wake up until 8.45am, which is oversleeping by my standards), with more hot cross buns and tea, a trip into the market for vegetables and cut flowers, and an hour or so finishing off Blood Maidens, the third James Asher book by Barbara Hambly. It retrod a lot of family ground (characters dashing across Europe by train, vivid portraits of major cities and their inhabitants on the eve of World War II, melodramtically gothic vampires mouldering in the dark, forgotten places), but I enjoyed it well enough.

    The third question of the book meme asks for:

    3. A book where you really wanted to be reading the "shadow" version of the book (as in, there are traces of a different book in the work and you would have much preferred to read that one)

    My answer )

    The other days )

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    dolorosa_12: (Default)
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