twincityhacker

Haven't said much so far this month.
Having rediscovered things that are not Doctor Who exist, I have been mostly rereading, which I do not then re review.
Also there are Power Tool Things happening in the building and I Do Not Like That.

Today I started rereading a fanfic, a really good long one,
https://archiveofourown.org/works/28820259/chapters/70685889 Initiation
Jaspergirl (old_fashioned_gal)

I like it because it makes specific interventions to bring more characters into the Initiative and then extrapolates plausibly from there. Old issues setup, existing characters, new answers roll out.

But when I reread or rewatch things I keep on getting annoyed
at the characters that have not changed
due to the linear nature of time
and the nonlinear way one can revisit twenty years ago in read only mode.

I get annoyed that the rerun people never learn.

Or sometimes they just seem so young, on account of being young, and then I'm not annoyed but I'm not exactly right there with them, you know?

So the obvious thing to do is to fic up a few ideas about what people are or would be doing now.
It's just if you maintain the event density of the original source then twenty to thirty years is a *wild* amount of time to extrapolate. I mean, they could do anything. They could be anything. Ascension is not off the table here. So how do you math that out?
( Read more... )

So I either invent people I'm annoyed with or start sorting out and resolving their tensions and end up with ones I like but no longer believe.

... either way I don't write them down so it's all one to the rest of the world, but.
tricky.

( Read more... )

So okays, I have been typing for over an hour I think and I'm not sure any of those paragraphs were actually helpful, and now it is sleeps time.

But I keep getting grumpy at existing stories, for staying the same, so I do need to come up with some answers for how to change things.

beccaelizabeth

Today I read
Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell.
I couldn't decide between 4.5 or 5 stars, because it was good and gripping and engaging, but then I lost focus and took ages reading the last little bit and went off in my head instead.
But now I put it down and checked my phone I realise I didn't set an alarm about something I wanted to see but was apparently distracted by staring into space doing absolutely nothing during the time I could have seen it so I'm willing to consider the distraction external to the book.

It was lots of good politics and military space whoosh boom and a complicated soul bonding plot
except then ( Read more... )

Anyway... It is a good book and I do not know if I am actually unsatisfied with the very end or if I am having an unfocused and unsatisfied sort of day or, very possibly, both.

This isn't a mood where I can do a fair book review I think.

beccaelizabeth

I can tell it's september again because I keep having that dream
where I am trying to sign up for a class
but I can't take the class
because I didn't finish a class
which I went to for one lesson
and somehow completely forgot about
and now I need to do exams
and to do exams I have to wander around the school in my dreams that is smushed together from every school I ever attended but especially the stairs bits and where I had to go around the out of bounds places by going up or down a floor
and getting lost
and then teachers catch up with me to tell me all about the classes I missed or screwed up
and
like
at what point do we stop having that dream?

... so of course I just reread the Scholomance books this week.
... didn't make the dreams more interesting but did make a nice contrast of could be worse.

camwyn

Debating making myself a new long-sleeved shirt for office use this fall. The dress code started off as business casual, went to 'vaguely business casual tops and jeans and moderately respectable sneakers' after COVID, and periodically flicks back to 'wear suits and business shoes' on days when we have clients visiting the office.

that being said, I am considering how many sharks I can get away with on this top.

beccaelizabeth

I finished watching the rest of Titans season one.
Grimdark bullshit that just stops instead of getting near resolving.
I mean if it were a story about new characters I wouldn't like it either, but as it is, saying it is about familiar characters? Rot.

Sadly I own three more seasons of this.
... there's a non zero chance I will watch them and get mad about it, but I keep telling myself this is an unhelpful use of my time, even by local standards.

beccaelizabeth

Today I did three tasks in my supported go outside hour, two appointment making things and one go to Boots for masks.
All my masks expired all in the same week even though I bought them far apart so I needed all new ones and Boots is the one place that seems to actually have them.

... that takes very little writing down but Maximum doing. I had to go speak to people at desks. People at desks are difficult tasks even when they are very kind and helpful.

So after that I got home and declared Out Of Spoons and All Done for the day, but I still only got four hours sleep so hopefully I'll get back to sleep at some point before I have to call it Tuesday.

This morning I started watching Titans https://hmv.com/store/film-tv/blu-ray/titans-the-complete-first-season , which I didn't watch when it was new due to suspicion I would not like it, and as it turns out I was correct. ( Read more... ) And I could keep going but presumably some people like it so I shall not.

I do not suspect I shall like it more if I watch it more but I'm going to give it a whole season because I own it.

Blah.

... I still have the tag Television for this sort of thing even though I don't watch it as broadcast television. Now I'm thinking what a new tag can be. Episodic visual storytelling doesn't exactly have a ring to it.

Also I have about two lines of the Loathing song from Wicked stuck in my head and may have to resort to catchier songs to get rid of it. Record stuck much.

But today Got Things Done, so that's a pretty good day.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

denise posting in

dw_news

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

beccaelizabeth

This morning I watched Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
then this afternoon I watched Wicked.

Aquaman was very underwater whoosh booms, but I thoroughly disagree with the theme thing where they were all
family is important, forgive your brother, you can rely on family!
I mean personally I feel that when someone has done a bit of murder and has attempted to kill you, you are allowed to leave him in prison. Not torture prison, that was not okay, but a general prison shaped future seems reasonable.
I am also not a fan of the thing where characters 'earn' their freedom by killing the right people this time. That seems of the bad also.
So I cannot say I liked this movie.
It did do the whoosh booms a lot with interesting visuals though. Points for effort.
... rereading this I realise I might be having problems with the genre conventions of both superhero and royalty movies. someone else might be better able to review it for what it was actually doing then.

Wicked didn't work for me. I do not usually watch musicals and I think I am not good at it. Like, Defying Gravity made me have many feelings, but basically all the rest of the movie my feeling was
why is this a singing
silly singing people.
... this is not a flaw of the movie musical, obviously.
So all I can conclude is I haven't got the hang of watching musicals
which is not actually surprising given how often I give up on sound and just watch with the subtitles on.

But I tried two new to me things so the day is not wasted.

camwyn

Today, on ‘Americans will measure in ANYTHING other than the metric system (even the honorary Canadians)’:

( It happened in the shower, it’s tmi-chix worthy )

of all the nameless but notable figures in the Gospel out there, I never expected to find myself identifying with the woman with the issue of blood. Yeesh.

Current Mood: annoyed

beccaelizabeth

Today I watched
City of Demons
and House of Mystery.

These are the first things I've watched that are not Doctor Who in... a while.
Checking the tags for films movies television here says the latest not Doctor Who thing was October 2023.
... possibly I need to vary my visual diet some. (though obviously you can vary your DW diet a lot just by watching slightly different DW.)

I read about these two animated movies when I looked up what Matt Ryan has been doing, because the voices. They're very different sorts of thing. Different ratings, and City of Demons is movie length where House of Mystery is a short.

Actually House of Mystery is four shorts but I see why they don't mention the others in the title because they are. Bad.

City of Demons is very anatomical and messy. Heaps of red brown goo everywhere. Lumpy bits.
It's actually a bit boring when that's the focus because that's not where the horror lives, that's just, like, paint.
There does manage to be quite a bit of horror too though, and a new to me take on The Newcastle Incident that is... considerably dark. ( Read more... )

It's a movie that seems to think the main threat of demons is they like making people into ketchup.

Could therefore be better.

But it had enough good bits and certainly delivered the ketchup.

House of Mystery got a bit repetitive fast but I did quite like the ending.
I did not like the art. It did a weird thing where it went back and forth between drawing John like he was in City of Demons and drawing him all pointy chinned and the wrong colors? It was distracting.
The actual plot ( Read more... )

It adds up to an okay story but I do feel I have overpaid for Mystery and got my money's worth for City.

Only now I want to disassemble them for parts and do them properly in a more Legends compatible way, which is the problem with multiple canons, the good bits version is ... very distributed.

ETA: Having gone on wiki and read a bunch of plot summaries for animated stuff
House of Mystery now makes more specific sense
it is bridging two particular Justice League Dark movies
and I have no desire to actually watch that Justice League Dark stuff
because it reads like a super epic crossover
like everyone has a minute for their bit of the story
and you need to know all about them already before you can keep up
but these Dark people are reboots away from anything I've read.

Also it read like Constantine destroys+reboots the multiverse there?

Which is a lot.

The more I read the more I think it is a mistake to make him Iconic in a sliding timeline, he gets stuck at the Fuck Around phase of his life when rather a lot of the point happened in Find Out.

It's like they think the grimdark is power, not tragedy.

So there's more I could be watching but at the moment I do not think I shall.

camwyn

Still here, just haven't checked in on the site in a while. It's been... it's been a day. Over and over and over again, you know?

beccaelizabeth

I have watched the Doctor Who season with 12 and Bill. And Nardole. ( Read more... )

I remain really angry about what they did with Bill.

And just sort of Tired about what they did with Missy.

It's comic book logic, returning things to the box when done with the toys, and it's the wrong kind of mess.

As for the regeneration episode... big feels but. Many disagreements.

Anyway: This season isn't the one I hang out in in my head. I'm all the way back with Torchwood and Jack in most of my imagines, which gets ever further into the past. I think I didn't have as much concentrate available for it as it deserved on first broadcast. I like it better now I've rewatched.

But on race it could do better.

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twincityhacker

July 2017

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Reading

I turn out to have a lot of rambling opinions on why reruns frustrate me but

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Difficult achievements

Code deploy happening shortly

Mississippi site block, plus a small restriction on Tennessee new accounts

Two movies, unrelated

TMI content, y’all have been warned

Constantine

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DW 12 Bill Nardole Missy

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July 2017

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