books! also ship models!
What I just finished reading:
"lord john and the haunted soldier", in which the haunting is psychological and there aren't enough ghosts. i still gave it two thumbs up.
also jem and the holograms: dark jem, in which the story is kind of silly but the art is cute and occasionally kind of nuts.
What I am reading now:
technically nothing, since i just got lord john and the scottish prisoner. not only did i drive to the bookstore to pick it up when i got home (i had to order it because while everyone has a ton of outlander books, lord john is hard to find in the wild), i drove to the bookstore in the torrential, driving rain. like, thunder and lightning, biblical downpouring, flooding the roads (twice) kind of rain. i got soaked walking to the car and re-soaked walking from the car to the bookstore, and re-re-soaked walking back to the car. and of course by the time i got home it was stopping. >.< but i have my book, so.
What I'm going to read next:
i need to get at least partway into scottish prisoner because i can think about what comes next.
on saturday my sister and i went to the peabody essex museum for an exhibit on ocean liners. so much cool shit, seriously. posters and brochures and menus and plates and furniture and drawings and and photos and models (so many models)
queen elizabeth. when you went into the cunard office in new york to book your cruise, you'd be confronted by this absolutely massive model.
queen mary
bremen. note the tiny plane on top.
quadruple-expansion tandem engine for ss buenos aires, 1887. there was a plaque and i took a picture of it so i'd know what this was a model of. :D it was apparently an advanced kind of steam engine.
plating model for ss united states, 1949. i'm guessing it's basically a diagram of how to put the hull together.
oasis of the seas. the exhibit went all the way to current cruise ships, altho there really wasn't a lot on them.
the back end. i'm not sure the guys who designed and built titanic and normandie and the queen elizabeths imagined a day when cruise ships would have rock walls and six pools and a carousel and a zipline.
and short films and decorative bits and a bunch of marconigrams (aka telegrams) to the olympic asking for news of the titanic the morning it sank ("looking for any particulars of the titanic", "keep us posted fully regarding titanic", and finally "cape race says no further news titanic"). there was a short animation about the sinking of the lusitania that was excessively propagandistic - it ended with "and they want us to trust the hun?" or words to that effect - the lusitania was torpedoed in 1915 by a german sub, apparently because she was carrying arms to britain and the germans said they'd sink any ships that did that, but there were a bunch of americans on board so the us was all up in arms. and it still took us two more years to join the war.
anyway. it was drawn and animated by winsor mckay, who wrote and drew a strip for the sunday funnies called little nemo in slumberland, and to watch this little animated piece of propaganda was really, really weird. but so interesting! it was overall a fascinating exhibit. i learned among other things that a lot of ocean liner companies made good money from european immigrants going to the us, but after ww1, when the us started restricting the number of immigrants it would accept, ocean liners had to market more and more to tourists and rich folks to stay profitable.
and on sunday i got a new tv. woot.
today at work we had a fun social outing to improv boston, where we got an improv show specifically tailored for us, which meant sketches about, uh, review notes. and hot dogs. and adding value. it was generally funny and it's always nice to have an excuse to get out of the office. :D yesterday, and i've been sharing this with everyone because it was so ridiculous, i processed a tax return with seven states, four of which went out with the federal return attached. sometimes you do that. it's not usually a big deal.
except this federal return was 977 pages. and i printed four copies. and then the tax associate came back and said oh wait, there's this other attachment, add it to three of the states. 372 pages. those returns were six inches thick by the time i was done. what the actual fuck.
a bunch of swimmers got caught in a riptide off the coast of florida, so another bunch of beachgoers formed a human chain to rescue them.
don't piss off your neighbor if your neighbor has a large flat plot of land, a lawnmower, and a lot of time on their hands.
the ladies from d&d's early days. illustrators, writers, designers, etc etc. it was still a boys' club, but there were definitely some influential women there.
"lord john and the haunted soldier", in which the haunting is psychological and there aren't enough ghosts. i still gave it two thumbs up.
also jem and the holograms: dark jem, in which the story is kind of silly but the art is cute and occasionally kind of nuts.
What I am reading now:
technically nothing, since i just got lord john and the scottish prisoner. not only did i drive to the bookstore to pick it up when i got home (i had to order it because while everyone has a ton of outlander books, lord john is hard to find in the wild), i drove to the bookstore in the torrential, driving rain. like, thunder and lightning, biblical downpouring, flooding the roads (twice) kind of rain. i got soaked walking to the car and re-soaked walking from the car to the bookstore, and re-re-soaked walking back to the car. and of course by the time i got home it was stopping. >.< but i have my book, so.
What I'm going to read next:
i need to get at least partway into scottish prisoner because i can think about what comes next.
on saturday my sister and i went to the peabody essex museum for an exhibit on ocean liners. so much cool shit, seriously. posters and brochures and menus and plates and furniture and drawings and and photos and models (so many models)
queen elizabeth. when you went into the cunard office in new york to book your cruise, you'd be confronted by this absolutely massive model.
queen mary
bremen. note the tiny plane on top.
quadruple-expansion tandem engine for ss buenos aires, 1887. there was a plaque and i took a picture of it so i'd know what this was a model of. :D it was apparently an advanced kind of steam engine.
plating model for ss united states, 1949. i'm guessing it's basically a diagram of how to put the hull together.
oasis of the seas. the exhibit went all the way to current cruise ships, altho there really wasn't a lot on them.
the back end. i'm not sure the guys who designed and built titanic and normandie and the queen elizabeths imagined a day when cruise ships would have rock walls and six pools and a carousel and a zipline.
and short films and decorative bits and a bunch of marconigrams (aka telegrams) to the olympic asking for news of the titanic the morning it sank ("looking for any particulars of the titanic", "keep us posted fully regarding titanic", and finally "cape race says no further news titanic"). there was a short animation about the sinking of the lusitania that was excessively propagandistic - it ended with "and they want us to trust the hun?" or words to that effect - the lusitania was torpedoed in 1915 by a german sub, apparently because she was carrying arms to britain and the germans said they'd sink any ships that did that, but there were a bunch of americans on board so the us was all up in arms. and it still took us two more years to join the war.
anyway. it was drawn and animated by winsor mckay, who wrote and drew a strip for the sunday funnies called little nemo in slumberland, and to watch this little animated piece of propaganda was really, really weird. but so interesting! it was overall a fascinating exhibit. i learned among other things that a lot of ocean liner companies made good money from european immigrants going to the us, but after ww1, when the us started restricting the number of immigrants it would accept, ocean liners had to market more and more to tourists and rich folks to stay profitable.
and on sunday i got a new tv. woot.
today at work we had a fun social outing to improv boston, where we got an improv show specifically tailored for us, which meant sketches about, uh, review notes. and hot dogs. and adding value. it was generally funny and it's always nice to have an excuse to get out of the office. :D yesterday, and i've been sharing this with everyone because it was so ridiculous, i processed a tax return with seven states, four of which went out with the federal return attached. sometimes you do that. it's not usually a big deal.
except this federal return was 977 pages. and i printed four copies. and then the tax associate came back and said oh wait, there's this other attachment, add it to three of the states. 372 pages. those returns were six inches thick by the time i was done. what the actual fuck.
a bunch of swimmers got caught in a riptide off the coast of florida, so another bunch of beachgoers formed a human chain to rescue them.
don't piss off your neighbor if your neighbor has a large flat plot of land, a lawnmower, and a lot of time on their hands.
the ladies from d&d's early days. illustrators, writers, designers, etc etc. it was still a boys' club, but there were definitely some influential women there.