Urban Stories
1) I returned from a weekend trip to Chicago to visit a friend who has been having a difficult year. (Her father died in August, her husband 3 weeks ago). To some degree I think the weather matched the vagaries of our time together.
When I'd arrived on Saturday, it was a beautiful day -- clear skies, temperatures in the 50s, low wind. That night I took photos from my hotel room window of the sinking sun and sunset. The next morning? You can see the low cloud cover, rain and soon after, snow. A lot of it. It never accumulated in the city center but we went out to Deer Park and it was thick there. It came down so fast that there was sleet covering the car passenger windows and we had to keep knocking it off to drive.
One thing that was fun to discover is that I was in Chicago during the Star Wars Celebration event. I knew it was coming soon but didn't realize it was this particular weekend. My hotel had a number of people attending the con so I could see people in cosplay every day. (I felt like I was undercover as a muggle).
My first morning I went down to breakfast with two women, one of whom was wearing a knit Leia buns hat and the other who was dressed as Rey. Chicago that Sunday was SO not a desert planet.
Monday morning? Clear sun again! You'd never guess it had been in the 20s and a winter day the evening before.
These were the things that stood out to me from my room view -- across the street there are two painted cows on a grass rooftop. (Also, farther down the way, trees inside a rooftop greenhouse)
Also, I was woken up both mornings at 7 AM by the banging drums of picketers at the building across the block. I didn't even realize it was a hotel, but apparently this has been going on for some time.
One plus for me was food during the stay. Dinner the first night was at a nice little Turkish restaurant. I had the zucchini beignets (really just somewhat bready zucchini fritters) and the Chicken Sofia, breasts stuffed with spinach, goat cheese, nuts and mushrooms in a fig reduction sauce. They bake their own bread on the premises but I wasn't impressed by it.
During the blizzard bomb day in Chicago we intended to have dinner at a restaurant called Senor Pan, except that once we got there it was closed with a sign saying it would reopen soon under new management. Luckily there was another Cuban place a mile down the road, D-Cuba, and there was actually a parking space at the end of the block. (Well, it was banned as a construction space but there wouldn't have been work in progress on a Sunday evening anyway, much less on a day like that).
Instead we walked carefully through slush to their door and were the only people there while we ate. I had the Cuban pork, which was fine but somewhat fatty, and the rice was a bit dry. But the plantains were perfectly cooked and at peak ripeness -- utterly delicious. The beans were also good.
My friend had the piccadillo and quite enjoyed it. We also enjoyed the shakes. I asked about a mamey and the server told us it wasn't available since it wasn't in season. That was definitely a good sign. I ordered the guanabana instead and was then asked "water or milk". Yes! My friend actually went for water with her plantain shake but I had milk and it was delicious. I have had the unfortunate experience of having them made with powder or/and in ice so it was great to have them made as they should be.
Our final meal in Chicago was at Zizi's Café, a Mediterranean food place. My friend had the eggplant tower, I had the lamb kofte, and her daughter had a barely touched platter of gyro with cheese wrap and fries. The fries were meh but the wrap was quite good. What's more the bread they served with a carrot slaw was delicious. We polished that off and the wrap bread was also good.
I went up to the roof of my hotel to take some photos of the lake view. I got a lot of bad reflection from the morning sun but it was still easily visible. Also, the elevators were so notoriously slow in the hotel that there was an advisory about times in the elevators, and a note in their hotel pamphlet that if one was checking out in the morning with a big group to call the front desk and they'd get everyone down. (How they'd do that, I'd like to know - I was on the 31st floor, the stairs were not an option).
So it is perhaps no surprise that they had a laminated sheet of riddles posted in between the elevators, presumably to help people pass the time. The odd thing to me was that, despite the clearly busy hotel, my only delay for the elevator was the day I checked in. There was a group of us waiting at least 8-10 minutes for a car.
While we did someone asked two guys about the pizza boxes they had in hand. They mentioned it was from the restaurant on the next block that I'd passed on my way in. I had marveled at the crowd outside, some near the sign indicating valet parking was $17. They said it was like that every night but that the pizza was worth it. I had my doubts. I've certainly had bad pizza and I've had good pizza but I have to wonder how much better the pizza would have to be to make that sort of delay and cost worth it.
2) I hadn't exactly forgotten that I'd recorded a few brief podfics years ago, but I had forgotten to add them to my AO3 account. So I corrected that this week. I had intended for it to be an ongoing thing but my free time changed a lot around the end of that year. The year before I had been job hunting and so assumed my schedule was very up in the air. A year later I realized I'd better start finding something to do because apparently the job search was not going to end as I expected. Enter the podfics and volunteering and then that new microphone got packed away just a few months later.
So I told
shadowscast, (who has been writing again!), that I was going to try and get that rolling this year. And now I'm saying it here so that I actually do some more recordings, although after all this time I've forgotten what little I'd learned. So it may not be soon.
3) I finally saw Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse and boy was that good! I can't recall anyone who didn't say the same these past months. I do really regret that when I had the chance to see it with friends that we ended up at The Favourite instead. Not that it wasn't a good movie also, but very different, and I think we would all have had more to talk about regarding Spiderverse instead (especially since one of the group was an animator).
I'm not sure what I have to say about it other than I'm glad it at least won an Oscar for Best Animated Film. Certainly the animation itself was a major feature of the film as opposed to simply the medium it was being told in. But I found it wonderfully expressive as well, which is one reason why I felt it was a mistake to make Kingpin so unbalanced. It made him more cartoony a villain and less of a developed character. Obviously the fight between Miles and Prowler was going to have much higher emotional stakes regardless, but Kingpin seemed like he belonged in a different verse.
I definitely liked the bit with Aunt May and Peter's Batcave shed. There were also many funny bits throughout, such as the ceiling group hide from Miles' roommate, the change in music when Miles first attempts to dive off of a building, the bit with Gwen's hair and Miles' sticky fingers, and so on. I also enjoyed different storytelling elements such as Miles' artwork assignment, his teacher not giving him the grade he wanted, and the wonderful conversation with his dad through the door.
The mid credit scenes were great (as was Stan Lee's cameo) and I liked Peter Porker's little extra feature. It was just all delightful and enjoyable. It's interesting to consider how the Spiderman movies have, on the whole, been fairly successful whereas a number of other superhero stories haven't.
4) I was thinking about how there are so many only kids of deceased parents in superhero stories. Why is this? Does it simply make it an easier story to tell because the hero has few obligations and ordinary ties? When one thinks of it, it's a very unusual story, especially in earlier decades and centuries where being an only child was a fairly unusual circumstance.
5) I just posted my 222nd rec at AO3, and it's for a fic that is as flawless as they come.
View poll: Kudos Footer-36
Comments at Dreamwidth
.
When I'd arrived on Saturday, it was a beautiful day -- clear skies, temperatures in the 50s, low wind. That night I took photos from my hotel room window of the sinking sun and sunset. The next morning? You can see the low cloud cover, rain and soon after, snow. A lot of it. It never accumulated in the city center but we went out to Deer Park and it was thick there. It came down so fast that there was sleet covering the car passenger windows and we had to keep knocking it off to drive.
One thing that was fun to discover is that I was in Chicago during the Star Wars Celebration event. I knew it was coming soon but didn't realize it was this particular weekend. My hotel had a number of people attending the con so I could see people in cosplay every day. (I felt like I was undercover as a muggle).
My first morning I went down to breakfast with two women, one of whom was wearing a knit Leia buns hat and the other who was dressed as Rey. Chicago that Sunday was SO not a desert planet.
Monday morning? Clear sun again! You'd never guess it had been in the 20s and a winter day the evening before.
These were the things that stood out to me from my room view -- across the street there are two painted cows on a grass rooftop. (Also, farther down the way, trees inside a rooftop greenhouse)
Also, I was woken up both mornings at 7 AM by the banging drums of picketers at the building across the block. I didn't even realize it was a hotel, but apparently this has been going on for some time.
One plus for me was food during the stay. Dinner the first night was at a nice little Turkish restaurant. I had the zucchini beignets (really just somewhat bready zucchini fritters) and the Chicken Sofia, breasts stuffed with spinach, goat cheese, nuts and mushrooms in a fig reduction sauce. They bake their own bread on the premises but I wasn't impressed by it.
During the blizzard bomb day in Chicago we intended to have dinner at a restaurant called Senor Pan, except that once we got there it was closed with a sign saying it would reopen soon under new management. Luckily there was another Cuban place a mile down the road, D-Cuba, and there was actually a parking space at the end of the block. (Well, it was banned as a construction space but there wouldn't have been work in progress on a Sunday evening anyway, much less on a day like that).
Instead we walked carefully through slush to their door and were the only people there while we ate. I had the Cuban pork, which was fine but somewhat fatty, and the rice was a bit dry. But the plantains were perfectly cooked and at peak ripeness -- utterly delicious. The beans were also good.
My friend had the piccadillo and quite enjoyed it. We also enjoyed the shakes. I asked about a mamey and the server told us it wasn't available since it wasn't in season. That was definitely a good sign. I ordered the guanabana instead and was then asked "water or milk". Yes! My friend actually went for water with her plantain shake but I had milk and it was delicious. I have had the unfortunate experience of having them made with powder or/and in ice so it was great to have them made as they should be.
Our final meal in Chicago was at Zizi's Café, a Mediterranean food place. My friend had the eggplant tower, I had the lamb kofte, and her daughter had a barely touched platter of gyro with cheese wrap and fries. The fries were meh but the wrap was quite good. What's more the bread they served with a carrot slaw was delicious. We polished that off and the wrap bread was also good.
I went up to the roof of my hotel to take some photos of the lake view. I got a lot of bad reflection from the morning sun but it was still easily visible. Also, the elevators were so notoriously slow in the hotel that there was an advisory about times in the elevators, and a note in their hotel pamphlet that if one was checking out in the morning with a big group to call the front desk and they'd get everyone down. (How they'd do that, I'd like to know - I was on the 31st floor, the stairs were not an option).
So it is perhaps no surprise that they had a laminated sheet of riddles posted in between the elevators, presumably to help people pass the time. The odd thing to me was that, despite the clearly busy hotel, my only delay for the elevator was the day I checked in. There was a group of us waiting at least 8-10 minutes for a car.
While we did someone asked two guys about the pizza boxes they had in hand. They mentioned it was from the restaurant on the next block that I'd passed on my way in. I had marveled at the crowd outside, some near the sign indicating valet parking was $17. They said it was like that every night but that the pizza was worth it. I had my doubts. I've certainly had bad pizza and I've had good pizza but I have to wonder how much better the pizza would have to be to make that sort of delay and cost worth it.
2) I hadn't exactly forgotten that I'd recorded a few brief podfics years ago, but I had forgotten to add them to my AO3 account. So I corrected that this week. I had intended for it to be an ongoing thing but my free time changed a lot around the end of that year. The year before I had been job hunting and so assumed my schedule was very up in the air. A year later I realized I'd better start finding something to do because apparently the job search was not going to end as I expected. Enter the podfics and volunteering and then that new microphone got packed away just a few months later.
So I told
shadowscast, (who has been writing again!), that I was going to try and get that rolling this year. And now I'm saying it here so that I actually do some more recordings, although after all this time I've forgotten what little I'd learned. So it may not be soon.
3) I finally saw Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse and boy was that good! I can't recall anyone who didn't say the same these past months. I do really regret that when I had the chance to see it with friends that we ended up at The Favourite instead. Not that it wasn't a good movie also, but very different, and I think we would all have had more to talk about regarding Spiderverse instead (especially since one of the group was an animator).
I'm not sure what I have to say about it other than I'm glad it at least won an Oscar for Best Animated Film. Certainly the animation itself was a major feature of the film as opposed to simply the medium it was being told in. But I found it wonderfully expressive as well, which is one reason why I felt it was a mistake to make Kingpin so unbalanced. It made him more cartoony a villain and less of a developed character. Obviously the fight between Miles and Prowler was going to have much higher emotional stakes regardless, but Kingpin seemed like he belonged in a different verse.
I definitely liked the bit with Aunt May and Peter's Batcave shed. There were also many funny bits throughout, such as the ceiling group hide from Miles' roommate, the change in music when Miles first attempts to dive off of a building, the bit with Gwen's hair and Miles' sticky fingers, and so on. I also enjoyed different storytelling elements such as Miles' artwork assignment, his teacher not giving him the grade he wanted, and the wonderful conversation with his dad through the door.
The mid credit scenes were great (as was Stan Lee's cameo) and I liked Peter Porker's little extra feature. It was just all delightful and enjoyable. It's interesting to consider how the Spiderman movies have, on the whole, been fairly successful whereas a number of other superhero stories haven't.
4) I was thinking about how there are so many only kids of deceased parents in superhero stories. Why is this? Does it simply make it an easier story to tell because the hero has few obligations and ordinary ties? When one thinks of it, it's a very unusual story, especially in earlier decades and centuries where being an only child was a fairly unusual circumstance.
5) I just posted my 222nd rec at AO3, and it's for a fic that is as flawless as they come.
View poll: Kudos Footer-36
Comments at Dreamwidth
.