liptonrm | Reading

Work today was a lot, but I got done everything I needed to get done and got out. There are stories I could tell but I'm too tired right now to rehash some of the nonsense my coworkers get up to.

Tomorrow, I am heading out to the island for Thanksgiving, and also to see Baby Miss L. She turns three on Monday! THREE! How is that even possible!? (I'm sure I will be posting the same exact thing on Monday.) But they are not having a family party for her, just a friends party, since she has so many friends now! She is quite the social butterfly! So I've packed up the books and clothes that are her birthday gift (and 1 toy - a magnetic tile thing she can build things with), and tomorrow she can open her presents! They go to my niece's in-laws for Thanksgiving (so they spend Christmas day with us), so I might not see her on the day itself, but that's okay I guess, especially if I get some time tomorrow. Plus, middle niece is going to stop by since she is working on Thursday (she's a nurse), so I will get to see her as well. All in all a good time, I hope!

If I don't get a chance to post tomorrow, I hope everyone celebrating has a Happy Thanksgiving! And everyone else has a great Friday Eve, also known as Thursday.

*

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Like a Luminous Girl - Mike Doughty (ha!)

marthawells

Great interview about Murderbot:

Bifurcating Character with Incisive and Witty Inner Monologue: a Masterclass with ‘Murderbot’ Co-Showrunners Paul Weitz and Spirit Awards Winner Chris Weitz

Since SecUnits issued by the Corporation Rim (a group of mega-corporations ruling the galaxy in the distant future) are sentient, complete obedience to human orders is guaranteed by the “governor module” in each unit. However, Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård, who nabbed an Emmy for his intricate and chilling performance in the HBO series, Big Little Lies), figures out how to disable its module to gain autonomy. “Murderbot is sentient from the get-go — it’s basically a slavery narrative. It’s important to Martha that Murderbot was always sentient,” Chris says of the close collaboration with consulting producer, Wells. “All the SecUnits are under human control. They can think for themselves but can’t act for themselves. So, they experience this torture of being at the disposal of others.” In addition to exploring themes of humanity and free will, the series also calls into question the issue of personhood, as Paul notes: “To what degree are we going to grant personhood to non-human intelligence?”

https://www.filmindependent.org/blog/bifurcating-character-with-incisive-and-witty-inner-monologue-a-masterclass-with-murderbot-co-showrunners-paul-weitz-and-spirit-awards-winner-chris-weitz/

***

I'm trying to get back into the swing of things after basically three weeks of travel in October, catching up on household stuff, trying to get ready for the holidays, getting back into working on the current book. I think I was more mentally exhausted than physically, but it was still a lot.

I didn't stay more than a day in any one city (except for two nights in Allentown, PA, which was lovely) and I was mostly leaving before most of the hotels started to serve breakfast, so I was living on a lot of airplane food. I did get to ride the train for the first time in the US (the Acela Amtrack) which was fun. I've ridden trains in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Scotland, but never here.

There was a lot of emotional overwhelm, seeing so many people, but also it felt really good, because they were all people who cared about books and art and creativity. The smallest crowd was in New York, about 40-50 people, the largest was in Seattle with around 300. The Texas Book Festival in Austin was like an encapsulation of the whole trip, being in a giant crowd of people (the largest in the festival's 30 year history) who were all "books, books, books!" I've heard that people seemed to be going to more arts-related events lately, and that was what I saw on my trip.

scaramouche

I never unsubscribed from photobucket's emails, even after I let my account lapse when they hit everyone with the USD400/year price tag lockdown uhhh (checks) eight years ago. So I would periodically get emails begging peeps to come back, and it's been funny to see the tone change.

The emails used to be:

Warning: Your account is over the free tier limit.

Keep your account active.

Urgent: Keep your account active.

You've become inactive.

Do you want to keep your photos?

Do you want to keep your account?

Action required.

Warning: Your photos may be subject to deletion.

Your account has been deactivated.

We can't keep waiting for a response from you.

This May Be Your Last Chance.

They kept on with all those warnings, sending anywhere from 2 to 6 emails a month with the same text to let you know.

And then! About a year ago the emails changed to:

A private space for your family's most precious moments.

Did you forget about the [xxx] photos in your account?

Do you want to recover your old photos?

We can't keep waiting a response from you.

Again and again, until the emails got another tone change about three months ago in August, to:

Aren't you curious to see your old photos?

Your memories are still here.

We found photos you probably thought were gone.

A little piece of your history.

A message from your past self.

Your old selfies are now fossils.

This one might bring a tear to your eye.

A glimpse into the good old days.

The past is calling (and it has photos).

Somebody's doing something!🤣 I'm just surprised they're still around, and the price tag is now USD80 a year, or USD8 a month, so I just might sign up for a month and download everything for reorganizing. I did download the most critical stuff way back when, but it might be fun to redo my old pic-heavy posts. Maybe.

Current Mood: amused

musesfool

I just watched that HBO documentary about Billy Joel and though it is long and a little repetitive in some ways, I thought it was well worth watching. I learned a lot that I never knew about him.

In a brief work update, they did finally announce the new CEO on Thursday, but for some reason*, the current board chair refused to give a quote for the press release, so they had the person we think is going to be the new board chair (still a secret for some reason!) give a quote instead.

*now my boss and I are speculating that she had backed a different candidate for the job and is taking it personally that she did not get her way, but that is absolutely just speculation and may be unfair to her. We just can't think of another reason why she's been so weird about the whole thing.

Yesterday was busy with committee meetings, and I logged off at about 4:45 and crashed hard into a two-hour nap, and then slept nine hours when I went back to bed for the night.

I can't believe Thanksgiving is this Thursday. Where did this entire year go?

***

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: Piano Man - Billy Joel

nilchance

it's a new campaign start day! we're playing The Crooked Moon, a folk horror by the people behind Legends of Avantris. what I've seen of their work (I've been watching the Actual Play that inspired the module) has been really creepy and cool, so I'm very excited to be traumatized.

the character I'm playing is Jabo, a hobgoblin from the Forgotten Realms who dies and gets dragged to this terrible afterlife where he becomes a living skeleton. the whole concept of his character is that he's basically Johnny from The Devil Went Down to Georgia, except he lost the fiddle contest and therefore his soul. (I always liked the devil's solo best, personally, for all that Johnny's is apparently a lot more difficult on a technical level and he basically beat the devil's ass.) Jabo is a ruthless little con artist with a cocky streak, and I love him very much.

a song that makes me think of him:

Watch on YouTube

marinarusalka

Current Mood: enthralled

scaramouche

This was a random get a few years ago, but I put off reading Nicola Sutcliffe's Queens of the Kingdom: The Women of Saudia Arabia Speak because I expected it to upset me. I've now read it and yes, it upset me! A lot!

( Cut for length. )

Current Mood: busy

nilchance

this is mostly blorbo-related posting, but I've had this stuck in my head for the last few days because of the cold despite the fact that it's not nearly winter yet:

Watch on YouTube

(yes, I'm also thinking of Kristoff and Dalton's five-year separation before the campaign starts. Dalton is resigned to prison for life; he thinks it's safer for everyone if he's there. per the DM, Kristoff refused to give up on him even if he struggled to find a solution. the campaign starts with Dalton getting out. I'm looking forward to them finally seeing each other again, to say the least.)

musesfool

When I was a kid, the Italian bakery in my neighborhood had all the usual types of fancy butter cookies and pignoli and tricolor cookies etc. but they also had a selection of less fancy cookies - like sesame cookies and S cookies and anginetti etc., and what we used to call chocolate sprinkle cookies, which may have started out similarly to butter cookies but were sturdier/crumblier, piped in a swirl, and covered with chocolate sprinkles. That bakery closed a long, long time ago (though you can still get frozen pasta with their name on it at the supermarket), and I have been trying ever since to recreate those cookies, with little success.

Today I baked the butter cookies from the Dolci cookbook (pic), though I didn't bother with sandwiching them with jam, and instead added chocolate sprinkles, and 1/2 tsp almond extract in order to try to recreate the taste of those old cookies. They are pretty close! They might need to be slightly less sweet, and probably cook a couple of more minutes, but they're the closest I've come so far. Also, I had the correct piping tip AND you don't chill the dough until after you pipe the cookies so it's a much easier proposition all around.

I also made the King Arthur small batch focaccia, but it never rises as much as they say it should during proofing. Still rises nicely in the oven and tastes great though.

The timing all worked out really well, even though I didn't plan ahead. Sometimes I get lucky since timing is generally the hardest part of cooking for me.

Ha! The announcer was like, "low event hockey, with only 5 shots" and now the Blue Jackets are getting a penalty shot! Igor stopped it though.

*

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: Rangers vs Blue Jackets on tv

musesfool

Today at work, they announced that we will be getting a COLA, retro back to July 1! My boss also floated a potential promotion for me (really, the work would mostly stay the same, but the title and money would be better) for after the new CEO is in place. We'll see if that ever happens. It would be cool if it did, but I won't hold my breath.

I thought I had other things to say, but I fell asleep on the couch after I logged off work and now I'm all fuzzy-headed.

*

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: We've Got You (i - Spark) - Vienna Teng

scaramouche

I got Anaïs Mitchell's Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown a few years ago after I first listened to the Hadestown OBC, watched a couple of bootlegs, and slowly realized hey, I'm into this. It isn't show I love end to end, like there's whole sections that don't do anything for me and I can only appreciate on a technical level, but the moments that hit hard, they hit very hard.

So I got Anaïs Mitchell's book because it was the only thing to do with the show that I could get from my side of the globe (still hoping for a touring production to drop by Singapore one day!), though I didn't read it properly at the time. I've read it now! It's all the lyrics as of the time of the Broadway opening, but Mitchell also goes through the creative process and shares lyric variations, some of which I've heard through the London production and Broadway previews. Some of the decisions that I found a little strange or disappointing (like the placement of "Why We Build the Wall" and the loss of Persephone's verse in "Chant II") are explained, as are the adjustments of the characters as time went along (especially how audiences tended to find Hades and Persephone more interesting than Orpheus and Eurydice).

Of course listened to the music and watched clips as I read the book, and got those feelings all over again. May have cried a bit, and so on.

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: restless
Current Music: Hadestown OBC - Why We Build the Wall

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liptonrm

June 2019

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the surface and everything lurking beneath

Reading

then i met you at the station in Ronkonkoma

Interview and Update

Photobucket

it's 9 o'clock on a saturday

disorganized TTRPG musical flailing 33

Seen right after my Pilates class today

Book Log: Queens of the Kingdom

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Raddysh reaches in and pulls on Wood

you're keeping calm, you're aiming higher

Book Log: Working on a Song

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June 2019

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