(no subject)
Hey, look, it's another really long annoying post. \o/
First, two weird/mildly interesting dreams. The first one I've forgotten most of, but the parts I distinctly remember involved some kind of bromance that was a cross between Rictor and Shatterstar, and a teenaged Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. I distinctly remember one of the guys actually being Julio, I'm pretty sure, but he had a suit, metallic and reddish and very Iron Man, that came apart into pieces. Something had happened to Shatterstar, and the suit would help fix it - would give him enough energy for him to go into an especially energetic state briefly, meaning he would, at least for a little bit, not need the suit, and would therefore be giving it back in a minute. Julio didn't know that the borrowing was only temporary, but gave the suit to him in the middle of a fight anyway (of course!), telling him that sometimes there were extra bits of it that didn't seem to go anywhere, but if you found a spot to put them and a light came on when you put them there, you were probably fine. o.O
The second of the two dreams was about a very nice house; large, spacious, done in light colors. It had some kind of evil twin house from a hell dimension, or something, that was starting to appear right next to it, a mirror image - just in bits and pieces, and once a piece of the evil house's wall had finished manifesting, all grey and partly rotted, the analogous portion of the good house's wall suddenly fell in. The rooms in the good house started to change, too - where there had been a kitchen, there was suddenly some kind of weird empty hair salon, and both of my friend's parents, who lived in the good house, were halfway turned into mannequins, which was pretty darn creepy. There was also a B-plot where I had a deeply awesome phone, and a considerably less awesome boyfriend who kept leaving messages on the phone that tended to start with things like, "So, hey, you never showed up," and end with things like, "I'm going to kill you, you stupid bitch," but I don't think that really managed to go anywhere before I woke up. It was kind of weird: laid out like this, it sounds like a nightmare, and there were certainly times during the dream when I was scared, but I wasn't especially relieved to wake up. I think I wanted to find out what happened. I know I'm probably getting excessive about recording these things, but some of them are really interesting, and I'm hoping I'll get better at remembering them as time goes on.
In Human Cultures last week, we watched a video about the gold rush and consequent white settlement of Papua New Guinea, about which I have a few thinky thoughts. First of all, in a general sense, I think it's pretty incredible that someone actually brought a camera that took video on that first white expedition into the highlands; the historical value of that is extraordinary. I also liked that the video we were watching had interviews with both the white guys who went in and the highlanders who were already there - and with some of the New Guinean women, for that matter. I appreciated getting multiple perspectives on the killings that happened; most of the videos about colonization that I've watched haven't been especially good on that score. Mostly, I ended up wondering what would have happened if the Papua New Guineans had had the chance to control their own natural resources, instead of having them essentially stolen.
I also have new gripes about B to record. For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, she came to Chicago on the trail of her father's killers rented both Princess Mononoke and Life Is Beautiful. Life Is Beautiful, she rented without knowing it was a movie about the Holocaust; along the way, there is a point at which it becomes obvious beyond a shadow of a doubt that the main character's family is Jewish. B responded to this revelation with the following utterly boggling statement: "But [the main character] doesn't look Jewish."
Fortunately for my own self-respect, my mouth did not manage to get in the way of my brain this time; I said something rather acidic about how, yes, right, of course, because you could definitely tell whether people were Jewish just by looking at them. Fortunately for our continuing friendly relations, she immediately turned sheepish, and apologized.
(... For the record, B does not spend every second of every day saying offensive things; just the other day, she paid for a complete stranger's lunch because he forgot his student ID card. I have to start noting the times she makes me glad I know her, too, just so that I don't end up with a ton of bitter entries and nothing nice to balance it out. :D)
And, finally, I spent this last weekend at home. We don't get today off, but Friday was our fall recess, and today I only have - well, would have had - one class, so I skipped and spent an extra day at home. The guineas are truly enormous now; they haven't lost all of their baby feathers yet, so if you had to, you could probably tell Clary, DG, and Evey apart, but it's tough. They have also developed the adorable habit of following anyone that comes within a fifteen-foot radius, including people, the dogs, and the car. They don't like to be without the sound of human voices, so we've put a clock-radio out in the barn, and we turn it on for them to listen to.
My sister got my mother a board game - The Settlers of Catan - for her birthday; we played it about four times this weekend, and came up with at least a page of alternate rules. The most significant alteration was probably our set of changes to the Robber. The Robber is a little grey piece that sits on the only desert tile on the board; when you roll a seven with the dice, everyone with more than seven cards loses half of them (rounded down), and you get to move the Robber to another tile and then steal a random card from somebody else. I don't know whether this was us seriously overthinking the game, or what, but my sister and I were both kind of annoyed by the implications of the Robber: there is no mention of the Robber being, like, a settler gone rogue, which to our minds - despite the game's instructions making no mention of any native population, either - leaves the Robber as ... a native of the desert of Catan, cast as a villain by the obnoxious white settlers (because, natch, the settlers depicted by the box art are white). Not good.
So, instead, we changed the Robber to a manifestation of natural disaster that we have decided to call the Grim Reaper. Rolling a seven activates the Reaper; you need to roll again to decide which kind of tile is affected by a natural disaster, and then move the Reaper there, and everybody on that tile needs to give one card of the same kind back to "the bank". Probably worrying about the meta implications of a board game makes us both complete freaks, but. I like the Reaper a lot better than the Robber. I'd worry about having erased the natives of Catan, except I don't think the game's creators intended for anybody to think of the Robber as such, or, indeed, for anybody to worry about whether Catan had a native population in the first place. Which is kind of fail in its own way, I guess.
I am managing to mostly keep up with SPN through reaction posts; I really, really don't want to spend time and energy watching the show until I know how S5 is going to end. Which I know is wimpy, and possibly even kind of wanky/entitled, but I need to be happy, okay. Unless the ending is in the general vicinity of what I want to have happen, I don't want to get myself super invested, because then I will cry like a baby. A hungry, angry baby. And be sad.
The same kind of goes for Merlin, except without the worry - that's just because I don't have access to the show at the moment.
I spent pretty much the entire trip back on the bus making hypothetical mental vids to the songs that came up on my playlist. Peculiarly enough, the fandom that comes most readily to my mind when I hear Stroke 9's Do It Again is due South, solely because of the "you're a freak" part; every time I hear that, there's, like, a ghost "... understood" that follows it in my brain, and I spend the rest of the song picturing RayK and Fraser.
... Someday, I should actually watch that show.
Also, I did not throw up on the bus, or pass out. \o/
First, two weird/mildly interesting dreams. The first one I've forgotten most of, but the parts I distinctly remember involved some kind of bromance that was a cross between Rictor and Shatterstar, and a teenaged Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. I distinctly remember one of the guys actually being Julio, I'm pretty sure, but he had a suit, metallic and reddish and very Iron Man, that came apart into pieces. Something had happened to Shatterstar, and the suit would help fix it - would give him enough energy for him to go into an especially energetic state briefly, meaning he would, at least for a little bit, not need the suit, and would therefore be giving it back in a minute. Julio didn't know that the borrowing was only temporary, but gave the suit to him in the middle of a fight anyway (of course!), telling him that sometimes there were extra bits of it that didn't seem to go anywhere, but if you found a spot to put them and a light came on when you put them there, you were probably fine. o.O
The second of the two dreams was about a very nice house; large, spacious, done in light colors. It had some kind of evil twin house from a hell dimension, or something, that was starting to appear right next to it, a mirror image - just in bits and pieces, and once a piece of the evil house's wall had finished manifesting, all grey and partly rotted, the analogous portion of the good house's wall suddenly fell in. The rooms in the good house started to change, too - where there had been a kitchen, there was suddenly some kind of weird empty hair salon, and both of my friend's parents, who lived in the good house, were halfway turned into mannequins, which was pretty darn creepy. There was also a B-plot where I had a deeply awesome phone, and a considerably less awesome boyfriend who kept leaving messages on the phone that tended to start with things like, "So, hey, you never showed up," and end with things like, "I'm going to kill you, you stupid bitch," but I don't think that really managed to go anywhere before I woke up. It was kind of weird: laid out like this, it sounds like a nightmare, and there were certainly times during the dream when I was scared, but I wasn't especially relieved to wake up. I think I wanted to find out what happened. I know I'm probably getting excessive about recording these things, but some of them are really interesting, and I'm hoping I'll get better at remembering them as time goes on.
In Human Cultures last week, we watched a video about the gold rush and consequent white settlement of Papua New Guinea, about which I have a few thinky thoughts. First of all, in a general sense, I think it's pretty incredible that someone actually brought a camera that took video on that first white expedition into the highlands; the historical value of that is extraordinary. I also liked that the video we were watching had interviews with both the white guys who went in and the highlanders who were already there - and with some of the New Guinean women, for that matter. I appreciated getting multiple perspectives on the killings that happened; most of the videos about colonization that I've watched haven't been especially good on that score. Mostly, I ended up wondering what would have happened if the Papua New Guineans had had the chance to control their own natural resources, instead of having them essentially stolen.
I also have new gripes about B to record. For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, she came to Chicago on the trail of her father's killers rented both Princess Mononoke and Life Is Beautiful. Life Is Beautiful, she rented without knowing it was a movie about the Holocaust; along the way, there is a point at which it becomes obvious beyond a shadow of a doubt that the main character's family is Jewish. B responded to this revelation with the following utterly boggling statement: "But [the main character] doesn't look Jewish."
Fortunately for my own self-respect, my mouth did not manage to get in the way of my brain this time; I said something rather acidic about how, yes, right, of course, because you could definitely tell whether people were Jewish just by looking at them. Fortunately for our continuing friendly relations, she immediately turned sheepish, and apologized.
(... For the record, B does not spend every second of every day saying offensive things; just the other day, she paid for a complete stranger's lunch because he forgot his student ID card. I have to start noting the times she makes me glad I know her, too, just so that I don't end up with a ton of bitter entries and nothing nice to balance it out. :D)
And, finally, I spent this last weekend at home. We don't get today off, but Friday was our fall recess, and today I only have - well, would have had - one class, so I skipped and spent an extra day at home. The guineas are truly enormous now; they haven't lost all of their baby feathers yet, so if you had to, you could probably tell Clary, DG, and Evey apart, but it's tough. They have also developed the adorable habit of following anyone that comes within a fifteen-foot radius, including people, the dogs, and the car. They don't like to be without the sound of human voices, so we've put a clock-radio out in the barn, and we turn it on for them to listen to.
My sister got my mother a board game - The Settlers of Catan - for her birthday; we played it about four times this weekend, and came up with at least a page of alternate rules. The most significant alteration was probably our set of changes to the Robber. The Robber is a little grey piece that sits on the only desert tile on the board; when you roll a seven with the dice, everyone with more than seven cards loses half of them (rounded down), and you get to move the Robber to another tile and then steal a random card from somebody else. I don't know whether this was us seriously overthinking the game, or what, but my sister and I were both kind of annoyed by the implications of the Robber: there is no mention of the Robber being, like, a settler gone rogue, which to our minds - despite the game's instructions making no mention of any native population, either - leaves the Robber as ... a native of the desert of Catan, cast as a villain by the obnoxious white settlers (because, natch, the settlers depicted by the box art are white). Not good.
So, instead, we changed the Robber to a manifestation of natural disaster that we have decided to call the Grim Reaper. Rolling a seven activates the Reaper; you need to roll again to decide which kind of tile is affected by a natural disaster, and then move the Reaper there, and everybody on that tile needs to give one card of the same kind back to "the bank". Probably worrying about the meta implications of a board game makes us both complete freaks, but. I like the Reaper a lot better than the Robber. I'd worry about having erased the natives of Catan, except I don't think the game's creators intended for anybody to think of the Robber as such, or, indeed, for anybody to worry about whether Catan had a native population in the first place. Which is kind of fail in its own way, I guess.
I am managing to mostly keep up with SPN through reaction posts; I really, really don't want to spend time and energy watching the show until I know how S5 is going to end. Which I know is wimpy, and possibly even kind of wanky/entitled, but I need to be happy, okay. Unless the ending is in the general vicinity of what I want to have happen, I don't want to get myself super invested, because then I will cry like a baby. A hungry, angry baby. And be sad.
The same kind of goes for Merlin, except without the worry - that's just because I don't have access to the show at the moment.
I spent pretty much the entire trip back on the bus making hypothetical mental vids to the songs that came up on my playlist. Peculiarly enough, the fandom that comes most readily to my mind when I hear Stroke 9's Do It Again is due South, solely because of the "you're a freak" part; every time I hear that, there's, like, a ghost "... understood" that follows it in my brain, and I spend the rest of the song picturing RayK and Fraser.
... Someday, I should actually watch that show.
Also, I did not throw up on the bus, or pass out. \o/