ELSEWHERE

Posted: **Fri Aug 19, 2022 8:07 pm**

I know that it's not the same thing, and it's got its own set of complications and problems, but I want to say that unless I have no ability to do so, I am /always/ willing to step in to cover animal expenses. That's different, to me, than any other expense someone might have. And like I said, I know that having someone else be able to help isn't the same thing, but I would like to be able to at least offer some peace of mind to that end.

Posted: **Fri Aug 19, 2022 9:25 pm**

Special Bonus Sandman Episode thoughts

Love how catlike the cats are. Definitely rotoscoped or something to that end, so it makes sense that their body language wouldn't be anthropomorphised or everything-is-a-dog-ed, but it's still appreciated. The animators definitely are familiar with cats, throwing in slow blinks is not something you do just because a rotoscoped animal did it.

The animation itself is hit-or-miss for me, I like it sometimes and don't others. I don't think it'll age super well.

I think the drowning was toned down and I appreciate that, but I might be conflating the scene in the comic with a scene from a Diane Duane book, and the more I think about it the more I think that is what I'm doing.

Calliope contains The scene that has stuck with me the most from the series, so I'm very interested in how they ended up doing it. Hopefully it didn't get Eternal Waking-ed

I really feel like MC's desperation should have been built up more. That said it's very clear that he's just saying things he thinks he should be saying, making half-hearted nods toward being a good person, and doesn't actually believe any of it

The 'she's not human' bits have got me thinking about my rant about saying non-human sapients "aren't people" because this is exactly the kind of thing that mentality leads to, and why it makes me so uncomfortable when people do it

I'm imagining an AU where Calliope makes a racket during the release party, partygoers find her and Richard ends up in a scandal about how he's been keeping a woman trapped in his house and abusing her. Huge scandal, his reputation goes up in flames, everyone is talking about it because he's famous and they've just been waiting for him to do something they can tear him apart for. No one believes him that Calliope is a goddess/muse because why would they? She's clearly a human woman

The face acting from everyone in this episode is Stellar, I'm so impressed

The Scene is alright. They toned it down, but it works okay. I'm unsure how I'd adapt it better for TV, really

Well, no, I can think of ways. But yeah, it's alright

On the whole the episode was a bit slow and didn't grab me as well as the rest of the series. Definitely feels like an outside, separate thing. I wonder if they'll be doing other standalone stories like this

Posted: **Fri Aug 19, 2022 11:44 pm**

Rereading the comics thoughts

Calliope suffers from similar issues as 24 Hours -- leaning hard on shock value to prove that comics can be an Adult medium. Less is lost in the adaption this time, it's not harmed by pulling back and making things less explicit. We can understand Calliope's distress without seeing her raped on-screen

The comic does a lot better at showing Richard's desperation, though -- Richard in the show is clearly doing well for himself, he's got a nice house, he gets speaking gigs, he's famous if not Famous. Showing better that he's on the verge of losing all of that would have been good, but I prefer the comic showing him living a terrible, filthy bachelor life before his rise to fame. I think they needed to limit their sets, for the show, so didn't want to have to give him two houses, and didn't want to have to completely re-do the set design. A perk of comics/animation/illustration, it's a lot easier to change the setting around

But that also explains why they kept him in the college when he wasn't at his house

Richard in the comics is such a sleeze, I also prefer the shift to making him a somewhat more subtle villain. I don't know how I feel about the digs at ""feminist"" writers, but without thinking too hard about it, I'm into it. Lip-service, through and through, and behind closed doors he's taking advantage of the skeletons in his closet.

The Scene was actually better in my memory than on the page, anyway, but I still like it done better there than the show. Once again the comic is not quite as good as one remembers, and once again the show was very faithful in its adaptation while still polishing and improving upon it.

The show reverses the order of Dream of a Thousand Cats and Calliope, so that was Calliope and this is Dream of a Thousand Cats. Thoughts.

Yeah, I was conflating the drowning in this with the drowning in A Book of Night with Moon. I actually like how it was done in the comic better than in the show, though the differences are very minor.

Fun story, not much to say about it. No real changes between it and the adaptation, so nothing to comment on there, either.

But I've realised because of the 'next time on' panels that the next comic to come is the Midsummer Night's Dream one, and I really wonder how they're going to do that. Maybe we'll get another surprise episode drop, as it's another standalone? Could we be so lucky? We have another standalone after that, before the capital-p Plot picks up again, and one of them is another small cast with limited settings. So maybe!

Posted: **Sun Aug 21, 2022 6:43 am**

Past couple of days or so has been a bit a bit of a blur but here are some things that have happened

-Finally vacuumed and wiped down the closet so there aren't any dead ants or remaining poison in it, so now I can leave it open again and Oz can sleep in it if she wants to (she does). I need to launder the blanket in Oz's carrier so I can put all that back into the closet, and get the rest of the stuff I had to pull out put away

-Did remember torah study and got everything ready for it the night before, but when I woke up for it this morning I was so tired still that I decided to skip it and go back to sleep

-New sunglasses arrived! They are good quality and I am very happy with them, but wish I'd gotten darker lenses for them and might buy a second pair some time when I can afford that kind of splurging

-Oz has a vet appointment on the 26th

-Current timeline of USPS issues: Was told package had been delivered, never received package, contacted USPS to complain, was told they couldn't do anything about it since the package had been marked delivered, made a mail theft report at their suggestion, Lee called their office to complain on my behalf, they re-opened the issue, was told they couldn't do anything about it with an exact copy of the last email they sent me to say they couldn't do anything about it, replied angrily to that email. Probably nothing will come of any of this and I continue to just have to hope whoever did end up with my package just returned it and the sender will be kind enough to re-send it to me. That happened the last time a package got lost, and the USPS insisted the package couldn't be found the entire time even though they should have known that it had been put back on a boat and sent back to Germany

-Got my Alleyman's Tarot deck! It took this long because I ordered a Touched deck, which meant the creator (and/or, as it ended up happening, a small team of people) added personal touches to many of the cards in the deck. I think that turned out fantastic and it was definitely worth the cost and the wait. Now I need to either pare the deck down into something shuffle-able or figure out how I'm going to handle the full deck when I try to do readings

-Lee and I finished Severance and were very unhappy to learn that the second season not only isn't out yet, it hasn't been filmed yet and is unlikely to appear for over a year. It's an extremely high-quality show and I'm looking forward to more of it -- but it's wild that this is just how shows are made, now. Can we please have shows that don't take years of hiatus between seasons? Can we please start making shows as they air again? Severance is a fantastic show and I enjoyed the hell out of it, but the season ends with a cliffhanger and we won't see more of it until mid-2023 at the earliest, so I can't actually recommend it to people! It sucks, I hate the current media landscape

-Also, fuckin' ballsy ending the season like that when you don't know you're going to get renewed

-Been feeling better every day, should be fully back on my feet soon

Posted: **Sun Aug 21, 2022 6:58 am**

The state of the plants lately has got me thinking about "summer as a metaphor for death"

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("re your tumblr")

Posted: **Mon Aug 22, 2022 12:09 am**

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I've filled two pages with practice hiragana!

Posted: **Mon Aug 22, 2022 1:39 am**

There's a local choir that I've been a member of -- an incredibly welcoming group, I always had a lot of fun participating in it. Obviously it got hit hard by COVID and regulations against group gatherings. Last winter they tried to do a season and ended up having to cancel it pretty early on because they couldn't find an outdoor location to practice in with adequate lighting for reading sheet music. This past spring they were doing a season, and I started off participating but as the season went on and talk continued of doing our usual performing at nursing homes, despite several choir members being unvaccinated, I became more and more uncomfortable and ended up bailing a few weeks in.

Today, I got an email from the group organizer -- for a lot of reasons, the future of the choir is in question: we need a sponsor, we need a new location, we need a new director as our current one is retiring. And, also, it included this, from said director:

I hope this finds you doing well!

Considering our past unfinished spring 2022 session: we meant well, and our mass contagion was certainly an unwelcome surprise, an abrupt and premature end. At least I hope we had fun getting there, and I was impressed – we were ready!

Unfortunately, that event has sown a seed of doubt in (at least) my mind, so I’m afraid we should not yet attempt a fall session. People are still falling ill to this insidious virus – it has changed society dramatically and very quickly.

So, uh. Feeling a little vindicated at deciding to leave, and glad I got out before I caught anything. And I really wish they had been willing to take all of this seriously sooner, or rather more consistently, but I am saddened that people suffered for it and that the choir is in danger because of All Of This.

Posted: **Wed Aug 24, 2022 12:39 am**

This Vael Victus guy is the person undertaking the recreation of Black Crown

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I'd been getting weird vibes from him for a while and now those vibes are justified. A bummer, I'd been keeping an eye on a couple of his projects and now I'm not comfortable supporting them, and I need to decide if I'm even comfortable continuing to look into the Black Crown fwen he releases it. Sucks!

Posted: **Wed Aug 24, 2022 2:10 am**

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I am rocketing through the Japanese course - the purple means I've fully completed those lessons and the purple progress line means I'm in the middle of the test to turn that series purple

Which is great but I'm frustrated because I've learned zero grammar. No sentences. Just words and hiragana. Which, like, I get it but please let me learn how to speak the language! I was getting into lenition by now in the Irish course

If the katakana lessons are more of this but with katakana instead of hiragana I'm going to bite something. I'm already supplementing these lessons with non-duolingo stuff and I might have to do that even more if I can figure out a good way to do it

Posted: **Wed Aug 24, 2022 5:18 am**

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I know I was just complaining about not getting stuff like this, but jesus

ELSEWHERE

Promiseland

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