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under-the-ladder · 2 months

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We got a super Thursday this year bigger than any of the super Saturdays lol. So much happened! I needed some time to gather my thoughts

First of all, I love that we have another nonbinary artist this year! Musically The Code reminds me of Jann in Emperor's New Clothes. I like how dynamic the song is, the opera merged with other genres (which I'm always a sucker for) and on top of that, the message!! The only thing is I always cringe at the line with ammonites... Can't have everything. This will be high in my ranking for sure. The question remains, will they be able to pull those notes live?

UK... I believed until the end, even after those snippets. The huge names (Olly and Danny) only raised the expectations. This is incredibly monotonous and lacks any climax. In a weaker year it could place like 10th in my ranking, not this time. A lot of wasted potential here :/ I still have hope for a redeeming staging since I've seen what Olly's capable of at the Brit Awards in 2021.

Not a crazy fan of We Will Rave. Everywhere around me I keep hearing oohs and aahs and because of that I just can't warm up to that song. Somehow I strongly feel about what staging would fit and which would break that song for me. Based on Kaleen's vibes I think she will go for the latter, sadly.

Cyprus scores surprisingly high this year in my ranking, considering what kind of song this is. Usually I stay indifferent towards upbeat girl pop. Idc what happened this time, I like the melodies and Silia's positive energy in the mv is just contagious.

And last but not least, my one of a kind funky Dutch man 🥹 I am absolutely in love with everything he does. While watching the premiere I immediately spotted that Europapa doesn't go as hard as his other songs, which I did expect. (Ok, the exception is that gabber(?) moment.) I get he might have done this to appeal to the wider audience but somehow it still feels very authentic to him as an artist and that is what counts in the end. The first part immediately brings to mind Samaa taviasta katsotaan, even Poland got mentioned. Maybe I shouldn't be comparing so much but I swear those are all compliments. I love both Emperor's New Clothes and Samaa...

The "Europe without borders" message speaks to me on a very personal level. It awakened the Europatriotic side of me, which I feel I might have unconsciously shut down some time ago due to the worsening political situation (both in Poland and throughout Europe) and people writing that view off as idealistic and naive. Idk whether I'm interpreting it right, but especially the picture of the burning cluster of buildings(?) as a symbol of the current political (but also environmental!!) situation on the continent hit me hard.

Generally, I find it insane how a Dutch rapper makes me feel more towards the place I live in than an entire lifetime that I spent learning about Polish history, martyrdom and a predefined meaning of what it means to be a "good patriotic Pole" being imposed on me by people whose national identity was shaped long before we entered the EU. I think that's a generational divide, but the worst thing is that those people are more and more power-hungry and not willing to give up that power when the time comes. Right now they are only reinforcing their positions and digging divides deeper than ever to control the nation

So yes, I am crying but not because of the dad situation (I sympathize wholeheartedly but can't relate) but rather my very personal relation to patriotism and the mill of thoughts Joost kickstarted in my head. This song awakes some deep deposits of feelings I was only partially aware I had, expect more thinking out loud in text on here.

Now, thanks for coming to my ted talk, if anyone even reached the end <3

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the-music-keeper · 3 years

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#song of the day 2021 #mountain goats #rock #what's super interesting to me #is that in 2020 people found things that had been out for a while #thought they related to the absolute opera level insanity of the year #and made them popular #this is one of those relics

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phoenixrisesoncemore · 4 years

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I was tagged by @wangxianbunnydoodles (oh my, this is long and you might regret it; also I don’t follow instructions well 😉). I tend not to be very good at these things (sorry to anyone else who has tagged me in these kinds of things before—this is a rare event happening mostly because I wanna talk about Tolkien books and ships) but here goes:

Top 3 Ships

I don’t actively ship characters that often. I’m not sure why that is. I do enjoy reading fic with pairings either canon or not, but I don’t often go “all in” on ships in most narratives I consume. There are notable exceptions (more than three but these are the three most recent—I have no idea how to identify my top ships):

WangXian (CQL). This is surely obvious from the current state of my blog, right? I blame The Untamed and its impossibly tender, only-subtextual-by-a-hair’s-breadth romance. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show express ultimate devotion, deep affection, true appreciation, complete understanding (eventually), and the sheer *necessity of the other* between two people quite like this one has. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever seen two characters and desperately wanted them together and happy as much as I have these two, so bravo to the cast and crew for generating such second-hand devotion in me.

Silvergifting (Tolkien). This is all @thearrogantemu’s fault. I’d read some Silvergifting before I read These Gifts That You Have Given Me, mostly out of curiosity (some good stuff, too!), but I had never read any Tolkien fic that convinced me it was *true* (on many, many levels, though the ship level is the one pertinent to this post). In any canon-like universe this ship hurts, but in the Gifts universe it hurts the most; it hurts like Hell. It hurts in the way only razor-sharp, sorry-the-universe-works-this-way, oh-are-those-my-entrails-on-the-floor-I-didn’t-even-feel-the-knife tragedy can hurt. And it’s so convincing that it’s just...a fact now. Tolkien just forgot to tell us. So now I ship Silvergifting, but most deeply, specifically THAT Silvergifting. (Meanwhile, 14 year old me continues to look at *significantly* older me like I’m insane.)

ZeLink (Legend of Zelda). Deep down I’m still 12 years old and no amount of fine lines and wrinkles is going to change that. When is Breath of the Wild 2 coming out?

Last Song

I listen to soundtracks and bombastic and dramatic orchestral pieces much more often than I listen to what people mean when they say “songs,” and a significant chunk of the “songs” I listen to are from musicals/operas.

Earlier today it was Hanz Zimmer’s soundtrack to Dark Phoenix (don’t start me up on the continuing disappointment that Phoenix adaptations continue to be to me—you don’t want to hear it; even I don’t want to hear it).

Before that it was Barbra Streisand’s The Broadway Album. (I prefer her outer space cover of “Somewhere” to the actual thing. Fight me.)

Before that it was Carmina Burana (One of my favorite things ever was when we went to a live performance of Carmina Burana and a boy who couldn’t have been more than 7 years old sat in the aisle in front of us and head-banged enthusiastically through “O Fortuna.” It was so metal. You go, kid. You get it.).

Before that it was a splattering of Billy Joel hits with emphasis on “2000 Years”, “River of Dreams”, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, “The Stranger”, and “Only the Good Die Young” (thanks to that outstanding WangXian interpretation!).

Of course the soundtracks to The Untamed/CQL have been on repeat for weeks around here, particularly every single iteration of “WuJi” and the flute-heavy instrumental pieces (man, those are good!).

Not long ago I had Sarah Brightman’s covers of “Figlio Perduto” from La Luna and “Glosoli” and “One Day Like This” from Dreamchaser burning through my iPhone battery (yes, I like popera).

Enya, and especially Shepherd Moons and The Track Which Shall Not Be Named has been on repeat a lot.

Last Movie

I don’t sit down to watch movies that often any more. It just takes too much stillness and undivided attention and more resistance to multi-tasking than I have. The actual last movie that I watched (in a “have it on on another screen while I work” kind of way) was Raiders of the Lost Ark, which, of course, I’ve seen umpteen times and which followed a similar rewatch of the Back to the Future trilogy. The last movie I watched completely without distraction was Book Smart; I don’t watch comedies very often, but I really enjoyed it in an “OMG, I can totally relate to this” kind of way (except for the class president thing—that would have required that I interact with other people my own age and also not be homeschooled). Before that I think it was the Tolkien biopic. Man, I still haven’t written anything about that.

Currently Reading (in order of when I started them)

Oh dear.

The Familiar: part 1, Mark Z Danielewski. *sigh* For as much as I think Danielewski is brilliant and House of Leaves is one of my favorite books ever, I’ve just not been able to get into much of his other work. It’s universally a time and energy investment to penetrate and puzzle through, and I just don’t have as much of that as I used to. House of Leaves makes that investment worth it from early on and is absolutely a page-turner once you settle in, but other than The Fifty Year Sword I’ve just not been able to get into the rest of his work. The Familiar: part 1 is supposed to be the first in a 26 part series which is currently halted at part 4, I think. Without a guarantee of all parts ever being published, I don’t think I’m ready to invest more time into part 1 and may end up abandoning it, unfortunately.

History of The Hobbit, Douglas Anderson. Anderson did what Christopher didn’t and gave The Hobbit the HoMe treatment (if a bit less literal and opaque in format). It’s fascinating (I mean, there’s the Beren and Luthien name drop you were not expecting right there in the first draft), but reading essentially the same passages with only small changes over and over can be a slog, so reading it has been an ongoing project for over a year now.

Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World, Verlyn Fleiger. This is Fleiger’s look at Tolkien’s Middle-earth in light of his association with Owen Barfield. Particularly, she is examining Tolkien’s work in conjunction with Barfield’s Poetic Diction and his thoughts on language and meaning. I have not read Poetic Diction, but I probably will now since it apparently addresses language formation as related to the origin of human consciousness which is SO up my alley.

New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton. My late sister-in-law had a masters in theology from Notre Dame and became a huge Merton fan. Meanwhile, my best friend actually spent a weekend retreat at The Abbey of Gethsemani. Between hearing about him from the two of them, I developed an interest in Merton. I happened to read “Moral Theology of the Devil” a couple of years ago. It was one of the most illuminating theological things I have read and deeply inspired my own Tolkien fic-writing (let’s just say the progress there is otherwise slow). This book is a collection of pieces which happens to contain that piece, and I’ve been skipping around through it for a while now.

The Lord of the Rings reread (Tolkien, obviously). I hate this, but I am so deep in so many critical Tolkien books that I’ve not had the chance to really sit down and relax into my reread for months and months and will likely just end up starting over. Plus I want to read it concurrently with the next entry in this list and the next entry is taking longer to get through because of its format. That entry being:

The Lord of the the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, Hammond and Scull. This is a treasure trove of data and insights for those really wanting to dig critically-historically into The Lord of the Rings on a chapter-by-chapter, passage-by-passage basis. The only issue with it is that jumping back and forth between the two (as you have to: this is a reference book) tends to kill the mood of The Lord of the Rings when read as it’s meant to be read: for enjoyment!

The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art, and Architecture, Gyorgy Doczi. This has been an ongoing read here and there since Christmas, especially as I work on two personal projects.

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Lesslie Newbigin. To be honest I don’t think I am going to finish this one. I like a few of the things he says, things I think are truthful and which need to be confronted in American Christian culture in particular, but it’s just too much Calvin for my taste, too many assumptions I do not share being the heretic that I am, and I spend too much time anger-notating about theology to read it with grace.

In Full Measure I Return to You, thearrogantemu. This is a reread of the (relatively) happy AU fic for my most favoritest Tolkien fic (Gifts), but I’ve put my reread on hold while I finish one of the two projects, after which I am diving in and screw the rest of this list for the time being.

Food Craving

Sushi. My kingdom for some good sushi. I’ve only had sushi once since we got back from NY and while it was the best sushi I have had locally IT WAS NOT OMAKASE AT SUSHI NOZ. It also didn’t require a personal loan to pay for, but *shrug* I’m spoiled now and will forever crave what I can no longer have.

People I’d Like To Get To Know Better

I hate tagging people in these things because I’m awkward and shy and do them so rarely myself that it feels hypocritical for me to ask it of others. That being said: if you’re a follower of my blog and you want to do this, please do! And please tag me! I’d love to get to know more about you 😊.

#getting to know you #wangxianbunnydoodles #tolkien #the untamed #movies #music #books #food

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bonesingerofyme-loc · 4 years

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in which what the fuck happened

so i’ve finally gotten around to watching season 4 of the expanse, everyone’s favorite science fiction tv show. i shall not call it a space opera because i actually know what a space opera is.

i’ve just finished episode 8 and what precisely the fuck happened though

this season is a mess

in no particular order, we have

* the Ilus plot, in which it appears the Bezos Bux weren’t enough to afford a larger cast, so there’s three belters with speaking roles and a really, really bad rebellious teenager plot that makes me feel like i’m watching a fucking scalzi novel (which is not praise). The Ilus plot in which murtry swings between being a Bad Man with Justifiable Reasons to being a mustache twirling villain, where Holden doesn’t just hold the idiot stone, he fucking swallows it along with Elvi and also the TV show does that TV show thing where they make really, really stupid design choices that leave you scratching your head. more on this all later

* the earth plot, in which Chrisjen Avasarala is never wrong once but everyone around her acts like she’s executing her political opponents in the streets and trying to sacrifice babies to satan

* the mars plot, in which bobbie has a nervous breakdown over the course of about three days and resets all her character development to her first introduction

* the belter plot in which Dummer continues to be a national treasure and Not-Ashford is still very enjoyable and they prove they are the only competant fucks in the entire fucking Belt but the writers do their level best to sabotage every second of it

Right, so, specifically

Let’s start with Ilus

I think my overall issues here can be summed up with this statement

“The set design, knowing that the heroes would be riding out a world spanning tsunami and flood, decided the optimal way to adapt the descriptions of the shell buildings from the novel to be THIRTY FEET UNDER THE SURFACE OF THE FUCKING PLANET THAT IS GOING TO BE FLOODED.”

My brother and I looked at each other and burst out laughing at the end of the episode in which Holden gets yote across the room by the deluge of water. The deluge of water from the planetwide tsunami. The deluge of water from the planetwide flood that placed the water a good forty feet ABOVE the interior rooms.

The planetwide flood that did not begin to recede for days. In a building riddled with holes and also one big giant one they made.

This encapsulates to many of the problems in this season in a single example. Writing choices and design choices that appear to be conceived of in the moment without any thought to the rest of the plot. Drama for the sake of drama. Convenient reveals after the fact to patch holes set up by the previous lack of foresight.

We later see the entry area is flooded, appearing to imply that the room they descend into initially is just a lower area that totally flooded and that they are at ground level in the rest of the complex. As if to acknowledge that, oops, yes, maybe having this complex be situated forty feet under the water level with holes all the fuck over means everyone would drown, so here’s a solution - except, except

When everyone got in right before the flood, they were all standing packed like sardines down in that low entry room. Which started flooding due to the fucking firehose deluge that came in because hello a piece of reinforced sheet metal isn’t going to be watertight in the slightest. So you’ve got water pouring into a small contained space packed with about forty people and supplies - that’s going to be ruining supplies and equipment because it’s saltwater and people are going to be panicking. How do they climb out the other side? There’s no ropes or lines there, it would seem, since everyone was still shuffling around in the entry area when the flooding started. How do they managed to get ropes or lines up to the higher areas in the building before people are trampled or drowned or all their supplies ruined? Why the fuck didn’t the goddamn building just have openings on the ground level leading into a bunch of interior rooms like it fucking did in the fucking novel because the fucking authors despite their other fucking flaws at least fucking planned ahead and had fucking editors that fucking made sure that things were fucking intelligently designed?

Oh, right. So that we could have a fucking scene where Holden has to escape from a closing door or be smushed. Because Holden definitely was in danger of dying and everyone believed it. Fuck. PLAN MORE THAN ONE EPISODE AHEAD.

Related to that - I’m loving the insistence that TV and movies have to make everything related to the main character, and not even tangentially. Directly, directly related. Remember how Ilus fucking asploding was a major oops that wasn’t anyone’s fault? Now it has to specifically be Holden’s fault since he can’t stop sticking is dick in things, so all the deaths are directly on his shoulders. Great job. Really, really great.

A nitpick here that doesn’t matter - remember when the moons were described as low-albedo and the nights were super dark? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

The Felcia plotline is awful too. Some random teenager stows away to orbit and then becomes instrumental in saving the Barbapiccola despite no experience and completely overriding the actual crew on board. Come on. Come on.

Also - thanks Holden and Elvi, you utter mouthbreathing nonces for not once thinking ‘Gee, maybe I should ask/tell about the MEDICATIONS THAT I AM CURRENTLY ON.’ It doesn’t make it an epiphany moment or a revelation when they realize his oncocidals are the cure, it makes them looking like absolute idiots. Holden, you shoot up daily. DAILY. You told Elvi about being a genetic hybrid. You didn’t think to tell her about the eighty gorillion rads you ate like soup on Eros and the fact that you’re swimming in anti-cancer meds?

Come the fuck on. Come. The. Fuck. On.

Stop making characters idiots to make the plot work.

Leaving Ilus, there’s Earth.

Fucking Earth.

So Arjun is now Avasarala’s campaign manager and a completely different person. The lack of chemistry between the two actors is so profound that scientists are considering writing a thesis on it as quantum mechanics actually should forbid such an extreme effect. He’s also not Arjun, since he’s alternating between unctuous and judgmental about as often as Naomi switches between an English accent and a butchered attempt at Belter. So that’s swell, we have to deal with a new actor and a brand new character who is awful and should never have been because Arjun was a chill lad and didn’t deserve this.

On the poitical side is Avasarala, who literally cannot stop being right all the time. Seriously, why is everyone up her ass about THE MEANS AND THE ENDS AND YOU LIE AND ITS ALL ABOUT YOU.

I mean sure it is all about her but she hasn’t been wrong yet. And a person can be both selfish and helpful. I couldn’t believe with Arjun got asspained about Avasarala leaking confidential footage of ancient inimitable alien machines that melt moons and blow up hemispheres of planets when the 0 and 1s are switched as a completely reasonable attempt to instill a very healthy and very justified caution in the general populace over the gigantic alien relic that was made out of a hundred thousand people ground up into blue gatorade and marinated on Venus after it broke the fucking laws of physics several times to link up to a pocket dimension that casually rewrites it’s own rules.

Like what the fuck Arjun, where do you get off judging Avasarala for releasing information about the extremely unpredictable and dangerous two billion year old alien doom machines that are scattered around the galaxy. Is it totally to her own benefit? Absolutely. Is it also totally the right thing to do? Also absolutely because you’ve got Gao hot under the collar about wanting to yeet every willing body through the ring gates into a hotbed of who-the-fuck-knows and acting like it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

Fuck.

Then we’ve got the marine raid. Avasarala is approached by her military advisors and generals who present to her a plan of action to go after a known terrorist who just attempted a direct attack on Earth’s defenses, defenses that I might add are not like ‘to keep people out’ but are actively existential defenses. So they bring a plan to her, lay it out, and she approves it, then when it goes tits up, the fucking General who planned it, brought it to her and executed it has the gall to blame HER for it failing (what) then resign because he can’t serve someone who plays loose with his soldier’s lives (WHAT) and then everyone gets assmad at her for costing like twelve marine’s lives in an attempt to capture a terrorist responsible for several hundred deaths already (WHAT) and then, and THEN siding with the OPA for Avasarala ‘breaking the peace’ when the UN went after a terrorist the OPA is known to have let go???

What the FUCK was going on in the writing room.

Meanwhile on Mars, Bobbie is going batshit insane. After btfoing a bunch of druggies to save her nephew she gets roped into some illegal stuff and then has a moral conundrum about it for maybe five seconds and then it like yeah nvm let’s steal this shit Y E E T. The very same Bobbie that was willing to go AWOL from her command, run to her own nation’s enemy during a cold war and refuse to ever budge on her testimony because the truth and honor meant that much to her.

Yeah.

Okay.

Then she meets a dude on sunday, goes on a date with him monday and tuesday, they bang on wednesday, then on friday he gets a job on Europa and is gonna leave and they have a fight as if they’d been seeing each other for months.

Uh.

Unless this show is doing completely different time scales for different plots, which they’ve failed utterly to communicate, we know how much time has passed. Bobbie met the dude like a fucking week ago, why is this full bore romantic drama as if they’d been in a committed relationship for months? They’ve literally banged twice in a hotel room and not even stuck around for cuddles.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

I don’t have much to complain about with Drummer and Ashford. I really like them both and both are fun to watch. They’ve also been treated the most reasonably too in terms of not acting like fuckwits or being dealt retarded hands by the plot thus far.

This season is awful. The Expanse was always subtitled ‘The Expounding’ because of how characters could, at the drop of a hat, produce a minute long monologue about anything, but this season it’s taken that and cranked it to eleven. Every other sentence is an ingratiating platitude about ‘hopeful we’re hopeful future happy live we’ll live yay see each other again strong be strong and brave firm strong and hopeful’. Fuck. Naomi exists to look sad and give brave monologues to people, especially the now lobotomized Lucia who apparently did die and came back without agency. Alex sort of just exists, drifting from scene to scene as if saying ‘I’m still here, guys. Guys? Guys...’ every antagonist takes three minutes to lay out their life story and evil beginnings and rationale only to suddenly flip the tables a few episodes later only to play a reverse uno card and be mustache twirlingly diabolical right after.

Oh yeah, and because this is my personal autism button:

NO, ELVI, THAT IS NOT HOW LIFE WORKS. LIFE MIGHT NOT ‘JUST AS EASILY’ BE BASED ON SOMETHING ELSE. THAT IS NOT HOW FUCKING PHYSICS WORKS. OTHER ELEMENTS ARE NEITHER AS PREVALENT NOR AS USEFUL IN FORMING BONDS AS CARBON. YOU COULD SAY ‘LIFE MIGHT RARELY AND EXTREMELY DIFFICULTLY BE MADE OF SILICON’ BUT DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE SAY ‘JUST AS EASILY. ALSO IRON. IRON. ARE YOU REALLY, REALLY GOING TO SAY IRON COULD BE USED AS A CHEMICAL BASIS FOR LIFE, BECAUSE HOLY COSMIC BULLSHIT BATMAN.

IN THE WORDS OF HERMIONE GRANGER: ARE YOU A HARD SCIFI OR NOT??

#the expanse #james holden #amazon the expanse #chrisjen avasarala #drummer #james sa corey #season 4 has been terrible and did they fire the entire previous writing team #if you propose silicon based life could be even as remotely common as carbon based i will find you and i will make you eat a fucking mynock

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