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Entry tags:
Problems that aren't really problems, etc.
I have so much to write about that I feel a little overwhelmed. I know, I know, some people would really like to have my problems. I keep wondering if I should write about all of it at once and let future entries worry about themselves, or if I should try spacing things out a little bit. In the end I decided to start typing and let the chips fall where they may. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Migrating my entries to Dreamwidth and then posting from there has reminded me of the difficulties of crossposting from DW, which is why I stopped doing it to begin with. Not difficulties, per se. I guess "inconveniences" is a better term. All of my stuff is on LiveJournal: my tags, my photographs, and of course my icons. I've had a permanent LJ account since 2003, while my DW account is a free one, and I am not *quite* ready to pay for a service I'm not sure I'll be using on a regular basis. On DW I only have six icons or so, which does make it easier to pick one, but limits my selection considerably. I can always go change the icon manually on LJ afterward, of course, but it's an extra step that I hadn't taken into account. Not the end of the world, like I said, but nonetheless somewhat inconvenient. So I fervently hope that this is all a tempest in a teapot and that LJ will carry on as it has for many years, with glitches and outages here and there, but nonetheless steady.
I've tried to work out how to transfer my pictures, and haven't found a way. I suppose I'll have to do it manually at some point. I lost all my original icons during one of my many hard drive adventures (alas), but I can at least download what LJ kept, I suppose. I'll add that to my ever-growing to-do list.
Aside from my non-post yesterday, I've at least been doing okay with my "post once a day" resolution. So far, anyway. I never did come back with my feelings about Rogue One, but let me assure you, there are many. Many, many feelings. All of them sad. SPOILERS AHEAD: So what I was NOT expecting, was for everyone to die. I mean, I expected there to be a very high death toll, due to the nature of the plot announced in the trailers, but this was very much an "Everybody's dead, Dave" sort of scenario. Anyway, I cried a LOT. Like, more than I cry at the average movie, which is already quite a lot. I don't cry much on my own, but give me a sad book or a movie and I am a giant puddle of emotions. I used to be embarrassed about how much of a sop I am at movies, but fuck it, I'm 38 years old now and I can own the fact that I weep buckets during the sad bits in movies (and sometimes the happy bits, too).
I've heard complaints that we didn't get to know the characters well enough to care about them, and I guess I can see that? I think a lot of the reason I was so upset at all of them dying was that my writer's brain decided to fill in all the gaps in their backstories for myself, and I instantly became attached to most of them, especially Bodhi, the pilot defector. Those of you who know me well already know what a sucker I am for redemption plot lines. Those of you who don't know me, well: I am a sucker for redemption plot lines. Also, Bodhi was such a sweetheart and he tried so hard right up until the very end, and wah! Yeah.
In short, I started crying at "May the Force be with you!" and didn't stop until after the credits rolled. I think I may have actually enjoyed this movie more than Episode VII, even if that is tantamount to blasphemy. I didn't like the idea of the main bad guy being an out-of-control boy barely out of adolescence who felt he deserved to be special just because of who his grandfather was. There are enough whiny man-children in real life without my seeking them out on the big screen.
I have two minor quibbles about the movie overall, and they are very minor. The first was the lack of text crawl at the beginning of the movie. I know this was a deliberate stylistic choice to separate it from the main storyline, but I've always associated the crawl with the universe, not a specific story. So it was a bit jarring not to have it.
The other quibble is, holy uncanny valley, Batman! I know that Peter Cushing is dead, but dear Lord, the CGI rendering of him and the one of young Princess Leia was so unsettling that it threw me right out of the story every time they were on screen. It's something about the way the facial muscles didn't quite move in time with the lips and the voice. Our CGI technology is very good, but it's not quite at the point of being able to replace humans (thank goodness), and it felt like someone had dropped two video game characters into the film. I wish they'd omitted Tarkin altogether (Leia is another story, but her one line didn't cause me to cease my suspension of disbelief nearly as much) and found another way around him. It could have been done just by mentioning him in passing, as someone higher up the chain of command.
There were, of course, some bits that were not as well written, but that's true of all Star Wars movies, and it's never been a deal breaker for me. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's part of the package. Characters are grandiose, dialogue borders on the cheesy, and everything is heroic and over the top. It's part of the appeal for me.
So there, those are my thoughts on the movie.
Tomorrow I have Meeting for Worship, and the plan is to hand in my letter of intent, requesting to become an official Member of the Meeting. Right now I'm an Attender only, but I had been planning on requesting membership last year. I didn't for a few reasons, and now seems like as good a time as any to pick up where I left off. I wrote an uncharacteristically (for me) short letter, mostly because I didn't know what to write, and I'll be giving it to the Clerk tomorrow, in order for my request to be brought to Meeting For Business, which is next week. If it has to wait for next month, so be it, but at least then it will be out of my hands. I am a little nervous about this, but I am trying to get my act together on a number of fronts, and this is one of them.
Tomorrow I'm also leading First Day School. Since it's sort-of-kind-of the first Sunday of the month (not really, but we're pretending it is), it's Potluck Sunday, which means the children help prepare a dessert for potluck. Of course, anyone who's ever tried to cook or bake with children knows that this means the adult in charge has about ten times the amount of work to do, but the kids love it, and it means I don't have to come up with a curriculum-based activity for them. I'm still pretty shaky when it comes to being able to talk about religious/Quaker themes with the children, although we once had a really great (but accidental) conversation about Quaker themes in How To Train Your Dragon. Cooking or baking with the kids means the added complication of needing to meet a lot of specific dietary requirements: one child is gluten-free, and since it's a kids' activity I make sure that it's also nut-free, which suddenly reduces our possibilities by quite a wide margin. So far I've done apple "biscuits" (cutting apples into discs and decorating them), fruit skewers, and gluten-free Rice Krispie Squares.
I am honestly starting to run out of ideas, but tomorrow we'll be making "peanut butter" cookies using Wow Butter (it's soy-based and tastes pretty much exactly like peanut butter, which flummoxes me to this day), sugar, and an egg. Three ingredients, no gluten, no nuts. Any of the parents who object to egg or sugar can bite me, which is, admittedly, not a very Christian sentiment. ;)
I have other thoughts, mostly about writing/not-writing, but perhaps I will indeed save those for the next post. Or never, depending on how chicken I'm feeling about writing about writing.
Migrating my entries to Dreamwidth and then posting from there has reminded me of the difficulties of crossposting from DW, which is why I stopped doing it to begin with. Not difficulties, per se. I guess "inconveniences" is a better term. All of my stuff is on LiveJournal: my tags, my photographs, and of course my icons. I've had a permanent LJ account since 2003, while my DW account is a free one, and I am not *quite* ready to pay for a service I'm not sure I'll be using on a regular basis. On DW I only have six icons or so, which does make it easier to pick one, but limits my selection considerably. I can always go change the icon manually on LJ afterward, of course, but it's an extra step that I hadn't taken into account. Not the end of the world, like I said, but nonetheless somewhat inconvenient. So I fervently hope that this is all a tempest in a teapot and that LJ will carry on as it has for many years, with glitches and outages here and there, but nonetheless steady.
I've tried to work out how to transfer my pictures, and haven't found a way. I suppose I'll have to do it manually at some point. I lost all my original icons during one of my many hard drive adventures (alas), but I can at least download what LJ kept, I suppose. I'll add that to my ever-growing to-do list.
Aside from my non-post yesterday, I've at least been doing okay with my "post once a day" resolution. So far, anyway. I never did come back with my feelings about Rogue One, but let me assure you, there are many. Many, many feelings. All of them sad. SPOILERS AHEAD: So what I was NOT expecting, was for everyone to die. I mean, I expected there to be a very high death toll, due to the nature of the plot announced in the trailers, but this was very much an "Everybody's dead, Dave" sort of scenario. Anyway, I cried a LOT. Like, more than I cry at the average movie, which is already quite a lot. I don't cry much on my own, but give me a sad book or a movie and I am a giant puddle of emotions. I used to be embarrassed about how much of a sop I am at movies, but fuck it, I'm 38 years old now and I can own the fact that I weep buckets during the sad bits in movies (and sometimes the happy bits, too).
I've heard complaints that we didn't get to know the characters well enough to care about them, and I guess I can see that? I think a lot of the reason I was so upset at all of them dying was that my writer's brain decided to fill in all the gaps in their backstories for myself, and I instantly became attached to most of them, especially Bodhi, the pilot defector. Those of you who know me well already know what a sucker I am for redemption plot lines. Those of you who don't know me, well: I am a sucker for redemption plot lines. Also, Bodhi was such a sweetheart and he tried so hard right up until the very end, and wah! Yeah.
In short, I started crying at "May the Force be with you!" and didn't stop until after the credits rolled. I think I may have actually enjoyed this movie more than Episode VII, even if that is tantamount to blasphemy. I didn't like the idea of the main bad guy being an out-of-control boy barely out of adolescence who felt he deserved to be special just because of who his grandfather was. There are enough whiny man-children in real life without my seeking them out on the big screen.
I have two minor quibbles about the movie overall, and they are very minor. The first was the lack of text crawl at the beginning of the movie. I know this was a deliberate stylistic choice to separate it from the main storyline, but I've always associated the crawl with the universe, not a specific story. So it was a bit jarring not to have it.
The other quibble is, holy uncanny valley, Batman! I know that Peter Cushing is dead, but dear Lord, the CGI rendering of him and the one of young Princess Leia was so unsettling that it threw me right out of the story every time they were on screen. It's something about the way the facial muscles didn't quite move in time with the lips and the voice. Our CGI technology is very good, but it's not quite at the point of being able to replace humans (thank goodness), and it felt like someone had dropped two video game characters into the film. I wish they'd omitted Tarkin altogether (Leia is another story, but her one line didn't cause me to cease my suspension of disbelief nearly as much) and found another way around him. It could have been done just by mentioning him in passing, as someone higher up the chain of command.
There were, of course, some bits that were not as well written, but that's true of all Star Wars movies, and it's never been a deal breaker for me. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's part of the package. Characters are grandiose, dialogue borders on the cheesy, and everything is heroic and over the top. It's part of the appeal for me.
So there, those are my thoughts on the movie.
Tomorrow I have Meeting for Worship, and the plan is to hand in my letter of intent, requesting to become an official Member of the Meeting. Right now I'm an Attender only, but I had been planning on requesting membership last year. I didn't for a few reasons, and now seems like as good a time as any to pick up where I left off. I wrote an uncharacteristically (for me) short letter, mostly because I didn't know what to write, and I'll be giving it to the Clerk tomorrow, in order for my request to be brought to Meeting For Business, which is next week. If it has to wait for next month, so be it, but at least then it will be out of my hands. I am a little nervous about this, but I am trying to get my act together on a number of fronts, and this is one of them.
Tomorrow I'm also leading First Day School. Since it's sort-of-kind-of the first Sunday of the month (not really, but we're pretending it is), it's Potluck Sunday, which means the children help prepare a dessert for potluck. Of course, anyone who's ever tried to cook or bake with children knows that this means the adult in charge has about ten times the amount of work to do, but the kids love it, and it means I don't have to come up with a curriculum-based activity for them. I'm still pretty shaky when it comes to being able to talk about religious/Quaker themes with the children, although we once had a really great (but accidental) conversation about Quaker themes in How To Train Your Dragon. Cooking or baking with the kids means the added complication of needing to meet a lot of specific dietary requirements: one child is gluten-free, and since it's a kids' activity I make sure that it's also nut-free, which suddenly reduces our possibilities by quite a wide margin. So far I've done apple "biscuits" (cutting apples into discs and decorating them), fruit skewers, and gluten-free Rice Krispie Squares.
I am honestly starting to run out of ideas, but tomorrow we'll be making "peanut butter" cookies using Wow Butter (it's soy-based and tastes pretty much exactly like peanut butter, which flummoxes me to this day), sugar, and an egg. Three ingredients, no gluten, no nuts. Any of the parents who object to egg or sugar can bite me, which is, admittedly, not a very Christian sentiment. ;)
I have other thoughts, mostly about writing/not-writing, but perhaps I will indeed save those for the next post. Or never, depending on how chicken I'm feeling about writing about writing.