on suits, dresden, livejournal, and the comic film wars.
Gina Torres quoting lines from "Top Gun" makes my toes curl with utter delight. Suits, you are catnip, I want to write and read all the things from you!
Livejournal under DDoS attack kind of turns that around, though. Listen, I've been with LJ since the lights were turned on, and I'll be here until the homepage is only available in Cyrillic, but here's some other places you can find me if you're looking to branch out:
Dreamwidth; I mirror every post between DW and LJ and answer comments in both places. Honestly, I think DW has some kinks that need to be worked out for me to be inclined to use it more, but it's there and you're welcome to friend it.
The Google+! You are welcome to add. At least, until they delete my profile for using a handle; honestly, this post is the best articulation I've seen of the divide between people who prefer using handles to using RL names. Anyway, G+ is amusing.
Twitter; I was there with more frequency before my job turned up to eleven, but I pop back in every now and then and try to add people back.
Tumblr; I freely admit I fail at this and haven't quite worked out how to properly reblog things, but there it is.
Delicious; lots of bookmarks there. Honestly, if LJ ever got tanked the thing I'd miss most is my memories. Food for thought, self.
And of course, my fic archive. All my fic, especially the older stuff I haven't posted to this journal, is archived there permanently.
There's only a few things at my AO3 account, which I have reservations about using, but challenge fic from the last two years is there.
So, there's that.
I read Ghost Story, and I have SO MANY FEELINGS. SO MANY. **SPOILERS**
I honestly thought I was going to hate this book, considering where "Changes" left off, but I was truly, wonderfully surprised to watch the reveal, slowly, of Dresden's killer and how the balance of power is shifting, preparing us for the second half of Dresden's whole story. Butcher has never been shy about saying that he has a twenty-book cycle for Dresden, and while writers change their minds all the time it definitely makes contextual sense for these two books to be the fulcrum for shifting the type of story he's telling. We've slowly been moving away from the noirish, Sam Spade aspects and more into the legendary hero-cycle that has been Dresden's fate all along. These two books, which I really think must be read back to back to fully understand what the sweet fuck is happening, tear everything down and start to build things back up in a way to facilitate that type of storytelling.
This is also the most introspective Harry's ever been, and it's a good look for him. And Marcone's presence was felt, even on the other side of the ocean. I mean, really. He built a fortress over Dresden's foundations. That's all a slasher could dream of and more.
And---Uriel's seven whispered words for the fucking win. I can't wait to listen to this in audiobook, even with John Glover replacing James Marsters; I like John's voice too.
**here endeth spoilers**
I know it's made the rounds already, but THE DARK KNIGHT TEASER TRAILER unf. It's like watching the Batception video only real.
You know, there's some real interesting differences between how Marvel has managed its movie franchise and how DCU has. The first real part of this is that Marvel Studios incorporated after the Spiderman movies (v1) while DCU remains, effectively, an imprint of its parent studio. This gives Marvel a lot more independent license to pursue a particular vision of its characters, which has in the last five years manifested itself into this combined universe that will reach a peak with The Avengers next year. It's pretty ambitious--if you can get them in on one film, say Iron Man or Captain America, you can kick them into the whole franchise of five or six films. They're capitalizing on the generation who grew up on 6 Star Wars films, on 11 Star Trek films. They're not going for the trilogy brass ring--they're going for the perpetual franchise, and it takes a huge amount of creative control to do that with characters who have sixty or seventy years of fan recognition, but are probably less well known to popular culture today (prior to these films).
Compare that to DCU, who clearly has less creative control in the execution or "master plan" of its films. They're working with completely different verses for each iteration of their iconic characters. Superman Returns was its own contained world (I totally wrote "contaminated," oh freudian slip); Nolan's Batman is Frank Miller's subconscious dancing across the screen; this summer's Green Lantern couldn't have been more tepid if it was the baby's bathwater. And you know, that would be fine if they all lived up to the promise of being strong films, but they're not. I love Nolan's Batman trilogy, but that's not my Batman, the Batman I've been reading since I was a teenager. That's a fucked up, dystopic variation on Batman that wings away from the vigilante I love, the man who built a family around him despite his avid protests. And Supes--Brandon Routh has the jawline for it, and the Richard-Jason aspect is interesting, but we're not going to kid ourselves that this is the same Superman who's BFF is a guy in a cowl, dealing with his not-so-secret lovechild with Lex Luthor.
DC couldn't even get the Wonder Woman project off the ground. They have never made a live action Flash movie. That is how haphazard the studio is.
What I'm saying is, Warner Brothers, the parent comany of DC Studio, has never figured out how to make superhero films well or cohesively, at least not since maybe Superman IV. (I'll give a small pass for the first four Batman films, because at least they were stylistically and internally consistent if not in their principle casting.) And realistically, they won't be until DC Studio is actually given the creative license needed to make films suitable for both general audiences with only a passing knowledge of the archetypical characters, and the slavishly devoted fans (i.e. me) who can offer expansive chronologies of the last several decades of comic book canon. Whereas Marvel, first created in 1996 with Blade and then X-Men, turned into a self financing company in 2004 and has been able to essentially muscle DC out of the market it used to dominate. And that is because it has creative fucking control over the movies it makes, which is what will make The Avengers be the fucking win.
Livejournal under DDoS attack kind of turns that around, though. Listen, I've been with LJ since the lights were turned on, and I'll be here until the homepage is only available in Cyrillic, but here's some other places you can find me if you're looking to branch out:
Dreamwidth; I mirror every post between DW and LJ and answer comments in both places. Honestly, I think DW has some kinks that need to be worked out for me to be inclined to use it more, but it's there and you're welcome to friend it.
The Google+! You are welcome to add. At least, until they delete my profile for using a handle; honestly, this post is the best articulation I've seen of the divide between people who prefer using handles to using RL names. Anyway, G+ is amusing.
Twitter; I was there with more frequency before my job turned up to eleven, but I pop back in every now and then and try to add people back.
Tumblr; I freely admit I fail at this and haven't quite worked out how to properly reblog things, but there it is.
Delicious; lots of bookmarks there. Honestly, if LJ ever got tanked the thing I'd miss most is my memories. Food for thought, self.
And of course, my fic archive. All my fic, especially the older stuff I haven't posted to this journal, is archived there permanently.
There's only a few things at my AO3 account, which I have reservations about using, but challenge fic from the last two years is there.
So, there's that.
I read Ghost Story, and I have SO MANY FEELINGS. SO MANY. **SPOILERS**
I honestly thought I was going to hate this book, considering where "Changes" left off, but I was truly, wonderfully surprised to watch the reveal, slowly, of Dresden's killer and how the balance of power is shifting, preparing us for the second half of Dresden's whole story. Butcher has never been shy about saying that he has a twenty-book cycle for Dresden, and while writers change their minds all the time it definitely makes contextual sense for these two books to be the fulcrum for shifting the type of story he's telling. We've slowly been moving away from the noirish, Sam Spade aspects and more into the legendary hero-cycle that has been Dresden's fate all along. These two books, which I really think must be read back to back to fully understand what the sweet fuck is happening, tear everything down and start to build things back up in a way to facilitate that type of storytelling.
This is also the most introspective Harry's ever been, and it's a good look for him. And Marcone's presence was felt, even on the other side of the ocean. I mean, really. He built a fortress over Dresden's foundations. That's all a slasher could dream of and more.
And---Uriel's seven whispered words for the fucking win. I can't wait to listen to this in audiobook, even with John Glover replacing James Marsters; I like John's voice too.
**here endeth spoilers**
I know it's made the rounds already, but THE DARK KNIGHT TEASER TRAILER unf. It's like watching the Batception video only real.
You know, there's some real interesting differences between how Marvel has managed its movie franchise and how DCU has. The first real part of this is that Marvel Studios incorporated after the Spiderman movies (v1) while DCU remains, effectively, an imprint of its parent studio. This gives Marvel a lot more independent license to pursue a particular vision of its characters, which has in the last five years manifested itself into this combined universe that will reach a peak with The Avengers next year. It's pretty ambitious--if you can get them in on one film, say Iron Man or Captain America, you can kick them into the whole franchise of five or six films. They're capitalizing on the generation who grew up on 6 Star Wars films, on 11 Star Trek films. They're not going for the trilogy brass ring--they're going for the perpetual franchise, and it takes a huge amount of creative control to do that with characters who have sixty or seventy years of fan recognition, but are probably less well known to popular culture today (prior to these films).
Compare that to DCU, who clearly has less creative control in the execution or "master plan" of its films. They're working with completely different verses for each iteration of their iconic characters. Superman Returns was its own contained world (I totally wrote "contaminated," oh freudian slip); Nolan's Batman is Frank Miller's subconscious dancing across the screen; this summer's Green Lantern couldn't have been more tepid if it was the baby's bathwater. And you know, that would be fine if they all lived up to the promise of being strong films, but they're not. I love Nolan's Batman trilogy, but that's not my Batman, the Batman I've been reading since I was a teenager. That's a fucked up, dystopic variation on Batman that wings away from the vigilante I love, the man who built a family around him despite his avid protests. And Supes--Brandon Routh has the jawline for it, and the Richard-Jason aspect is interesting, but we're not going to kid ourselves that this is the same Superman who's BFF is a guy in a cowl, dealing with his not-so-secret lovechild with Lex Luthor.
DC couldn't even get the Wonder Woman project off the ground. They have never made a live action Flash movie. That is how haphazard the studio is.
What I'm saying is, Warner Brothers, the parent comany of DC Studio, has never figured out how to make superhero films well or cohesively, at least not since maybe Superman IV. (I'll give a small pass for the first four Batman films, because at least they were stylistically and internally consistent if not in their principle casting.) And realistically, they won't be until DC Studio is actually given the creative license needed to make films suitable for both general audiences with only a passing knowledge of the archetypical characters, and the slavishly devoted fans (i.e. me) who can offer expansive chronologies of the last several decades of comic book canon. Whereas Marvel, first created in 1996 with Blade and then X-Men, turned into a self financing company in 2004 and has been able to essentially muscle DC out of the market it used to dominate. And that is because it has creative fucking control over the movies it makes, which is what will make The Avengers be the fucking win.