Monday catch-up
The possibly not interesting stuff:
Thanks to the matcha powder I got in Annapolis and a simple recipe (mix 1 tsp matcha + 1 tbsp warm water to form paste, + 1 cup milk + ½ tbsp sugar, or substitute flavored soy milk and nix the sugar), I can now make iced green tea lattes whenever I want. Take that, Starbucks! Now I never have to go there again. Matcha powder was one of the more expensive teas in the store, but it's far cheaper than buying the equivalent number of lattes. Not that I get more than a few each summer.
Ordered a new, non-broken laptop, which arrived last week. It's not perfect, but I like it overall. It's an ultraportable business model (that was on sale/rebate/employee discount for almost half off, hurrah, plus contributions from both parents as a birthday present), so it's light and should be stable with better tech support, although it also means there's no optical drive and the keyboard isn't very much fun to type on. To balance out the smaller screen, it has a webcam, six hours of battery life and several times more storage space than I was dealing with, which says more about the pitiful capacity of my old laptop than the moderate size of the new one. Anyway, I should now be able to do things like watch Netflix and save Word documents without having to worry about the system freezing.
Just in time to bring it with me on three weekend trips next month without feeling like there's a brick in my backpack. \o/
The possibly more interesting stuff:
Tried to finish the SGA tentacle dildo fic but am still stuck at ~800 words. Have no idea where the story goes after John and Rodney get on the bed. :/
Have seen some good movies lately:
And in conclusion, your moment of Zen:
"If you come home and your parrot says 'Who's a pretty boy?' that's one thing. But if your monkey says it that's something else," said Christopher Shaw of the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. (source)
(For a more interesting article from the same day that also centered on animals in research, try this one about a Project Nim documentary. The "hug hug hug" anecdote is pretty amazing.)
Thanks to the matcha powder I got in Annapolis and a simple recipe (mix 1 tsp matcha + 1 tbsp warm water to form paste, + 1 cup milk + ½ tbsp sugar, or substitute flavored soy milk and nix the sugar), I can now make iced green tea lattes whenever I want. Take that, Starbucks! Now I never have to go there again. Matcha powder was one of the more expensive teas in the store, but it's far cheaper than buying the equivalent number of lattes. Not that I get more than a few each summer.
Ordered a new, non-broken laptop, which arrived last week. It's not perfect, but I like it overall. It's an ultraportable business model (that was on sale/rebate/employee discount for almost half off, hurrah, plus contributions from both parents as a birthday present), so it's light and should be stable with better tech support, although it also means there's no optical drive and the keyboard isn't very much fun to type on. To balance out the smaller screen, it has a webcam, six hours of battery life and several times more storage space than I was dealing with, which says more about the pitiful capacity of my old laptop than the moderate size of the new one. Anyway, I should now be able to do things like watch Netflix and save Word documents without having to worry about the system freezing.
Just in time to bring it with me on three weekend trips next month without feeling like there's a brick in my backpack. \o/
The possibly more interesting stuff:
Tried to finish the SGA tentacle dildo fic but am still stuck at ~800 words. Have no idea where the story goes after John and Rodney get on the bed. :/
Have seen some good movies lately:
- Sunshine (2007) with Cillian Murphy and Michelle Yeoh - Nice sci fi movie, high on tension and lower than feared on ridiculousness. Could have done without the semi-supernatural villain and implausible last-minute dramatics, but a lot of the rest of it felt like the golden era of SF movies, with a ship's crew alone on a long-distance mission battling the elements and their own fears and weaknesses. Did a passable job, I thought, of depicting scientists' love for their specialties and their computer models and the forces of nature, even if the crew's median age was much closer to Hollywood standards than that of actual principal investigators; and the crew was nicely diverse, even if, as per usual, most of the terrible things happened to the non-white characters first. The sound of a ship's distress beacon as picked up against the background noise of space was magnificently creepy.
- Beginners (2010) - In which Christopher Plummer comes out after his wife dies only to get a terminal diagnosis himself a few years later, and son Ewan McGregor is sad about everything. I thought this was one of the best movies I'd seen in a while, but our movie-going party was split two and two on liking it vs. being annoyed by the main character (McGregor)'s angst.
It was largely about a pair of young, depressed, relationship-phobic people, which I can very much relate to, so I sank into their storyline with enjoyment. It reminded me of (500) Days of Summer, when I'd understood exactly where Summer was coming from while she really irritated a majority of other viewers. Beginners also shared some of (500) Days' and Amelie's (and other films', of course) penchant for whimsy and for photographs and other illustrations that interrupt the traditional movie narrative shots.
Most of the rest of the movie was about the main character's relationship with his parents as well as their own relationships, including their marriage and the father's relationship with a younger man (a wonderfully dorky Goran Visnjic) after the mother (an even more wonderful Mary Page Keller) passed away, all shown in flashback-memory-snippets because they had both died before the movie started. There was a lot of interesting stuff folded in there about being "out" in the '50s versus the 2000s and what it could mean for two partners to navigate a marriage where one is struggling with himself so deeply; and what a son, as a child and as an adult, knows and doesn't know about what was going on. The flashbacks worked well and showed how all of these observed and experienced interactions overshadowed and influenced the main character's (in)ability to sustain his own romantic relationships. Two of our party wished there'd been more screen time for the parents' stories. I wouldn't have said no-they were beautifully acted and understated-everything in the movie was well-acted-but at the same time I felt like we knew them already, for example from movies like Far from Heaven.
The characters were quirky, but not in the larger-than-life eccentric way that turns me off about movies like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Squid and the Whale. And maybe you could see where everything was going in the end, but I liked that the movie didn't stop at the first couple of easy spots where it could have, as McGregor and Mélanie Laurent, a.k.a. the French Meg Ryan, tried to make a go of it; i.e., moving in together does not precipitate a happy ending.
Plus there was a really cute dog. - HP & the Deathly Hallows pt. 2 - A satisfying conclusion to the series. There were parts I would have expanded and parts I would have condensed, but overall it was engaging and nice to look at (despite a crappy projection in our theater), and I loved how bits and pieces from the earlier films/books came together to lead to victory. (Though what was up with the multiplying/disappearing basilisk fangs?) Liked it much more than the book, same as the other movie, and thought the whole sequence in semi-afterlife was more coherent than it was in writing. In particular, creepy-fetus!Voldemort was fantastically done. Thought the enrichment of Harry's perceptions of Dumbledore and Snape was well-portrayed too. One of my favorite images was Snape holding Lily's body and sobbing; and his quiet command for Harry to look at him, even when it was followed by the tired and inadvertently comical line about his mother's eyes. Loved McGonagall stepping in to duel Snape after having held herself back all year for the sake of the students and the school. Loved Voldemort's little moans of pain each time a horcrux bit the dust; echoes of the big moans when he was pressing Harry's scar up against the tombstone in Goblet of Fire. Of course loved the split-second view we got of Voldemort suspending Harry by a series of tentacle-ribbons.
Still super pissed about Lupin and Tonks and to a lesser extent about the twin. Why do it, except that it was aimed for maximum reader/viewer pain? Ugh. Only somewhat redeemed when Harry saw his ghostly loved ones and they consisted of James & Lily and Sirius & Lupin. Also, the way the battle was depicted invited questions about why it had to happen at all. We didn't get to see much of the fighting, and from the sound of it, Voldemort could have just told Harry to meet him in the forest first and avoided the whole fiasco. *shrug*
And in conclusion, your moment of Zen:
"If you come home and your parrot says 'Who's a pretty boy?' that's one thing. But if your monkey says it that's something else," said Christopher Shaw of the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. (source)
(For a more interesting article from the same day that also centered on animals in research, try this one about a Project Nim documentary. The "hug hug hug" anecdote is pretty amazing.)