queenbookwench | Reading

Last year I marathoned the very well made series “Paradise” (Hulu in the US, Disney + for the rest of us), but was quite torn about whether or not I was happy regarding the announcement of a second season due to the show’s success. It seemed to me the first season told a mostly self contained story and the premise would lose its key ingredient in a second season. Also, there had been a couple of shows which were terrible when more than one season was greenlighted because they clearly hadn’t planned for it. Otoh: nitpicks aside, I did love Lost, which made a pretty radical premise change and pulled it off. And the first season of Paradise had been pretty perfect for what it was. So I watched. And based on the first three episodes now released (and there is a reason why the first three came together, more beneath the spoiler cut), I am happy to report that it looks like I was wrong in my fears. Those three eps are excellent.

( Spoilers are now all pumped up and ready… )

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: on the train

sholio

I watched this over the last couple of days. (8 30-minute episodes on D+.) It's really unusual - not like anything else in Marvel's backlist. Somehow it felt like it belonged to a different era, like the type of superhero show that might've been made in the 70s or 80s. It's a comedy-drama-satire about two out of work actors trying to get a role on the superhero movie Wonder Man, which (in universe) is a remake of a cult hit show from a few decades ago. And that's about 90% of the plot. There is SOME other stuff going on which provides a superhero-related throughline for the movie, namely

spoilers for things revealed in the first couple of episodes

one of the actors (the protagonist) actually does have superpowers and is hiding it because in the MCU, super-powered individuals have to carry insane amounts of liability insurance to work in Hollywood and no production would hire him; and the other is spying for the government. So obviously both of these things provide the show's main sources of will they? won't they? who'll find out? tension.

But mostly it's just an indie-ish show about being an actor. It's unglamorous, it's full of slow-paced scenes of people doing ordinary things, trying out for parts, dealing with petty professional jealousy and eccentric directors, having long conversations in cars. The staging and lighting and the very ordinary-looking supporting characters are all more art-film than Marvel movie. It's about people who love movies both personally and professionally, and know them inside and out. It's at least partly framed around Midnight Cowboy, at a showing of which the two protagonists meet, and it's also framed around beats from the script for the Wonder Man movie that the two are memorizing and acting out scenes from. At least some of the actors on the show are simply doing cameos as themselves, in the form of people that the protagonists might have plausibly run into in their careers.

I wasn't on board with every creative choice the show made, and in fact I sort of went back and forth between episodes on whether I actually liked it all that much (though I was sold by the end), but it's fascinating and thoughtful and interesting and a bit unpolished-feeling in a way that Marvel productions never feel anymore. In fact, the naturalistic dialogue and slightly clumsy/awkward way the characters relate to each other felt real enough that I would sometimes stumble a bit when it would hit a more typical Marvel beat, as it sometimes does, because it felt a little out of place.

I'm legitimately unsure who the target audience for this show is, and maybe so were Marvel's TPTB. I'm honestly surprised it got made at all.

( Some actual spoilers )

It made me remember how, in the early days of the MCU, it felt like the movies were all doing something different and being something different, and then they just all kinda came to feel like the same thing. This one is doing something different and being something different - in this case: 1970s arthouse film - and even if I wasn't on board with everything, I liked what it was doing and being.

tielan

Finished Draft 2 of The Nullifae: And If I Rise. Had to rewrite a whole section in the middle, then cram in a sequence where they meet the Oracle, who's a Fae.

There's still some stuff to be done - I need to rewrite the opening scene so it's more happening, less infodumping. And I think I want to write a snapshot at the end where Jenna is getting more or less fired from her job. Do I write her getting fired from her work, or do I just show her in the doghouse before she calls the Director of Crossover who gave her his number if she decided she wanted a change of scenery?

Choices choices.

It's about 60K finished, which isn't huge but isn't small potatoes either.

likeadeuce

Watching as many adaptations of 'Wuthering Heights' as I can get my hands on, professional tennis, or updates on the baby monkey at the Japanese zoo that's having trouble making friends.

How are you?

aurumcalendula posting in

vidding

Title: Where Love Goes
Fandom: ClaireBell
Music: Where Love Goes by Kai Mata
Summary: 'this could be the start of something special'
Notes: Premiered at Escapade 36!

AO3 | bsky | DW | tumblr | YouTube

siderea

2026 Jan 20: ApasheOfficial on YT [music video]: Kyiv by Apashe & Alina Pash

Watch on YouTube

primeideal

Again, not really saying anything new here, just trying to articulate part of the problem that makes lots of sense in my head but maybe isn't obvious to everyone else...

( Read more... )

shewhostaples posting in

girlmeetstrouble

Apologies everyone, I'm not feeling very well.

This does at least give me a chance to let you know that we'll be reading chapters 1-3. Thereafter we'll do either two or three chapters per week (there are 22 total) but I need to look ahead to see what split makes most sense.

musesfool

It snowed until around 3 pm today! Just...so much snow. Friend L sent me a pic from her building in Manhattan and it was like the storm had barely had an impact, yet by me, even though the street had been plowed, it was all snowy again. Anyway, thankfully, my boss is also under about 2 ft of snow out on the island, so we are not going in tomorrow (the person who was supposed to come meet with us had their flight cancelled, so they never even made it to NY, so that will all get rescheduled, too). Whew.

Anyway, have some brief thoughts on recent TV:

- Shrinking: ( spoilers ) This show remains hilarious and endearing.

- Pluribus: I finished it and I don't love it but I am interested in seeing where it goes. ( spoilers )

- The Pitt: ( spoilers )

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Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Irresistible - Fall Out Boy

tielan

I need to sit up, no slumping.

Still no contract.

I wonder if the HR manager has pushed back against the client group manager...

ETA 2 hours later: Apparently they are renewing me, but they're changing the payroll company they're paying me through, and I'm not sure what's going on with the rate, or how much longer the contract will go for.

--

Also, per my icon: you should do a search on "political" quilts at QuiltCon '26. There are a bunch of conservatives with their panties in a knot because "suddenly" the quilts are "political"...

--

We have two new chickens. Babies, 6 weeks old. We're keeping them inside for the moment, in a cage, mostly because the coop we'd put them in needs repair and I won't have proper time until Sunday (but am stealing lunchtimes and after work). We're also trying to get them used to cuddles.

musesfool

I got up to watch the hockey this morning and despite Team USA pulling it off in OT, I do not accept that Bill Guerin was proved right in his choices. Eighty-five percent of the game was played in their defensive end and they only won because Connor Hellebuyck stood on his head. Maybe a little more scoring power on the team could have given them some breathing room. I am just saying. I'm happy for Hellebuyck and the Hughes brothers, and I got a little teary when they brought out the Gaudreau jersey and his kids, and I'm not gonna lie, watching Jon Cooper and Connor McDavid (along with Sam Bennett, Tom Wilson, and Brad Marchand) lose was pleasing to me on a deep, personal level, but overall, I'd still have preferred the Finns or the Swedes take home the gold.

I then baked some oatmeal for breakfast for the week, and made macaroni salad for a few days of lunch, and then for dinner, I made angel hair as planned, though when I actually read the recipe, it was not anything new to me - it was what I always do for a super quick tomato sauce, except they were adding chile crisp to it, which I guess is the thing nowadays - every recipe I read has chile crisp in it, but I'm not really a chile crisp person. I have the heat tolerance (in terms of spiciness, though I also don't like my food super hot temperature-wise either) of the whitest baby you know.

Anyway! It is a super easy but delicious meal and if you don't mind waiting a few extra minutes, you can do it all in one pot. Boil your pasta - angel hair is best for this, imo - and reserve a cup of pasta water before you drain it. Return the pot to the stove over low heat and add in a nice glug of olive oil (2 tbsp if you need a measurement), and then add a whole can or tube of tomato paste to the oil (so between 4 and 6 oz). Stir it around and season it as you like - I used garlic and onion powder, oregano and red pepper flakes and salt, but if you want to get fancy, you could probably saute a diced shallot and some minced garlic in the oil for a minute or two before adding the tomato paste - for 2-3 minutes, until it's all hot and sizzling. If you are so inclined, add chile crisp to suit your taste. Then add the pasta back, and about half the reserved water and toss it until the pasta is coated. I only used 4 oz of angel hair, so if you have more, you might need more water. Then put it in bowls and sprinkle it with parmesan cheese. If you are in an even bigger rush, you can sizzle the tomato paste in a frying pan while the pasta cooks and then combine it all back in the pasta pot. The couple of minutes you save isn't worth having to wash an extra pot to me, but it might be to some people.

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Current Mood: productive
Current Music: Cruel Summer = Taylor Swift

musesfool

This afternoon, I made this lemon cake because 1. I had an open container of ricotta I wanted to use up before it spoiled, and 2. I've been looking for a nut-free alternative to my favorite lemon cake since one of my nieces has a tree nut allergy. It turns out I did not have enough ricotta, but I made it up with sour cream, and the cake seems fine. It did stick to the pan in one small spot so I didn't take a picture of it since it had a gash in it, but it tastes great. The trick of adding turbinado sugar to the glaze to make it crunchy is a good one, too.

I also made dressing for coleslaw, which I've never done before - always just bought the pre-made deli version - and it's ok, not great. Not tangy enough, tbh. I wonder if replacing some of the mayo with buttermilk is the way to go. I ate some with a steak I pan-fried for dinner and that was nice. I don't have steak very often, but sometimes it goes on sale and I get it.

We're supposed to be getting between 12"-18" of snow tomorrow/Monday (wait, I just checked, and the current forecast is 39% likelihood of at least 18" if not more, wow), and I'm supposed to go into the office on Tuesday, so I guess we'll see what actually materializes, whether the streets are cleaned, and how I feel on Tuesday morning. Supposedly we're getting a free lunch, but I don't know when the consultant who is supposed to be buying it for our in person meeting is flying in, idk what is going to happen. There was some back and forth on Teams today about the storm and they are notifying everyone to be remote on Monday, which is the smart choice.

Anyway, my menu is not very cozy - I was planning on making that lemony macaroni salad for lunches, and some baked oatmeal with cherries and chocolate chips for breakfast. I do have bread, milk, and eggs, so there could always be French toast! Though I did make that on Wednesday when I realized it was Ash Wednesday (and that I'd completely forgotten Shrove Tuesday). I'll probably have pasta for dinner tomorrow regardless, since it's Sunday.

Today, I watched Batman Ninja, which features the Batfamily time traveling back to feudal Japan (but so much Joker and I am so tired of Joker), and then its sequel, Batman vs. the Yakuza League, which I enjoyed more because it has Wonder Woman in it and she's fantastic as always. It also features ( I guess this is a spoiler ) It was weird to me though that we got 4 Batboys (Jason's feudal Japan headgear is HILARIOUS), but no Cass or Babs at all, and I didn't love the art for Selina. Someday we'll get an animated version of Wayne Family Adventures and the girls and Duke will get their due!

*

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: So Far Away - Carole King

siderea

If you live in the BosWash Corridor, especially in NYC-to-Boston, you need to be paying attention to the weather. We have an honest to gosh Nor'easter blizzard predicted for the next 3 days, with heavy wet snow and extremely high winds – the model predicts the damn thing will have an eye – which of course is highly predictive of power outages due to downed lines.

Plug things what need it into electricity while ya got it.

Whiteout conditions expected. The NWS's recommendation for travel is: don't. Followed by recommendations for how to try not to die if you do: "If you must travel, have a winter survival kit with you. If you get stranded, stay with your vehicle."

I would add to that: if you get stranded in your car by snow and need to run the engine for heat, you must also periodically clear the build-up of snow blocking the tailpipe, or the exhaust will back up into the passenger compartment of the car and gas you to death.

As always, for similar reasons do not try to use any form of fire to heat your house if the regular heat goes out, unless you have installed the necessary hardware into the structure of your house, i.e. chimneys, fireplaces, and wood stoves, and they have been sufficiently recently serviced and you know how to operate them safely. The number one killer in blizzards is not the cold, it's the carbon monoxide from people doing dumb shit with hibachis.

NWS says DC to get 2 to 4 inches, NYC/BOS to get 1 to 2 feet. Ryan Hall Y'all reports some models saying up to 5 inches in DC and up to three feet in NYC and BOS.

2026 Feb 21 (5 hrs ago): Ryan Hall Y'all on YT: "The Next 48 Hours Will Be Absolutely WILD...". See particularly from 3:30 re winds.

If somehow you don't already have a preferred regular source of NWS weather alerts – my phone threw up one compliments of Google, and I didn't even know it was authorized to do that – you can see your personal NWS alerts at https://forecast.weather.gov/zipcity.php , just enter your zipcode. Also you should get yourself an app or something.

primeideal

Didn't agree with everything in this article, but it had an interesting deep dive into the translation of the Biblical phrase "love your enemies"

The Greeks had at least two words for enemies. An echthros was someone hated, a personal enemy. Polemioi were the people of a city that one's own community was contending against. (The root polemos means "war.")
...
The verb form is second-person imperative. Unlike English, Greek also has a third-person imperative, which is awkward to translate. If Jesus had used it, one might translate this commandment as "Let them love enemies," or passively as "Let enemies be loved." But the commandment is addressed to you.

"Echthroi" shows up in Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wind In The Door," I didn't realize that was a Biblical Greek word!

lilly_the_kid posting in

vidding

Title: One Foot In Front Of The Other
Fandom: The Long Walk
Music: One Foot In Front Of The Other by Walk The Moon
Characters/Pairing: Ray/Peter; ensemble
Summary: Taking this one step at a time.
Warnings: graphic violence

Here on AO3

sholio

Cannot BELIEVE I still have an SPN icon!

Anyway ... I first started making fanvids for fun in 2002, but I began posting them on LJ in 2006, and since 2026 is therefore my 20th anniversary of posting the first one (#what) and I've been wanting to get more of them on AO3, I decided to make that a project for this year!

So here's my 2006 one and only Supernatural vid, Life is a Highway.

This isn't the first one I put online, but of the 2006 vids I think it's probably one of my favorites and a good one to start with. Contains clips up to late season one because that's all I'd watched at that point and most of what was available. Here's the original LJ-imported-to-DW post. Please enjoy this dive into ~~an alternate reality~~ a moment in time when season one of Supernatural was literally All There Was.

Some notes if you'd rather read them afterwards

Obviously at this point all I have is the exported file rather than the original vidding files (as this was at least 5 computers ago) so 2006 quality is what you're getting, including some slight wonkiness with jerky video and slightly odd cropping (I was screencapturing the video, which explains both the slight borders that occasionally appear - I got a lot better at cropping later - and a few instances of jerkiness as my 2006 computer struggled to render the video). The credits also include my original 2000s-era LJ name, which some of you may remember.

IIRC, I was making these earliest vids on a really old copy of Adobe Premiere that I had absconded with from my college computer lab in the 1990s.

Watch on Vimeo

Also posted on AO3.

If you want a 12 Mb download in 2006 quality, you can download it here!

Also, an interesting bit of context on the 20th anniversary vidding project - I discovered recently that I uploaded a bunch (most? all?) of my older vids to Vimeo in 2016 on the private setting, so apparently I was planning a *10th* anniversary vidding project, but got derailed somehow. What is time.

pandarus

Just come back from watching “Wuthering Heights”. I’m not mad about it, in either sense. Here be incoherent thoughts:

- it’s a 2 hour long music video: glib, flamboyant & silly.

- the child actors were GREAT. Bless them. Cracking work, really sad that the story scooted forward to the adult actors so fast.

- I love Margot Robbie & I mean no disrespect when I say ( Read more... )

author_by_night posting in

fictional_fans

I don't know if this post is allowed, I just wasn't sure where else to ask.

I'm currently working on a Strangers Thing fic. I am very new to the fandom. I'd like someone I can bounce off of, and maybe a beta down the line? It's an AU with a better ending to El's story, giving her what I think she deserved. There might be some Canon Divergence for S4 as well. The fic is Byler, not Mileven, although she and Mike will remain good friends.

Any takers?

Again, Modly Beings, feel free to delete.

lyr posting in

thisfinecrew

If you have a bit of time to spare, you can help Ultraviolet with the whack-a-mole fun of reporting GoFundMe pages trying to raise money for the killers of Pretti and Good in MN. I have been doing the reporting side of things, and there's just something soothing about watching the pages come down.

Here is a link to a round-up of the pages spotters have collected which handily also includes a link to instructions on how to report: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PqG-bKig3Z8BbHMN7HTrYwWrIoPkQbrM6QboRP_z4mg/edit?gid=86617038#gid=86617038

pegkerr

I drove to Needles and Skein this week and bought a red Melt the Ice hat. For those of you not aware of this news story: a knitting shop in St. Louis Park did some brainstorming about what they might do to respond to the ICE Metro Surge in the twin cities. One of the employees, Paul Neary, read about the history of red hats that were knitted in Norway in World War II to signal resistence to the Nazis. They became so popular that the Nazis actually outlawed the wearing of red knitted hats.

So the shop posted a pattern on the knitting website Ravelry, charging $5.00 for the download.

On the day that I went to the shop, they had raised $750,000.00 through the sale of the pattern, which they are donating entirely to charities to help people caught up in this extraordinary situation. People all over the world have downloaded it. The wall behind the cash register was full of letters from people who had knitted the hat and sent it to the store. I was able to buy a hat for $30.00 that someone had knitted and sent in.

While scrolling through some news feeds about this, I saw this Instagram post from a man who has a knit hat company in Norway who was talking about this story, and about the initiative to encourage people to wear their Melt the Ice patterned hats on February 26, which is the anniversary of the date that the Nazis attempted to outlaw the red hats. In the course of his commentary, he mentioned a Norwegian word that struck me as a very appropriate title for my collage this week: Menneskeverd, which refers to the fundamental, intrinsic value of every human being simply by virtue of being human.

That is what we are fighting for, here in Minnesota.

I thought about ICE, and icebergs, and how what you see is only a small part of what is hidden underneath. I mentioned when I did my post last week that I'm doing work that I can't talk about. We are ALL doing work that we can't talk about, here in Minnesota, much of it on the encrypted app Signal. The administration is rumbling about trying to outlaw the totally constitutionally protected actions we are taking to deal with this siege, threatening to subpoena media companies to identify people who dare to criticize ICE. I have wondered about the safety of my blog here, in this little corner of the internet where I have been posting for close to twenty years.

Well. Doing what we are doing requires bravery, because you see, even though the administration argues against empathy and threatens those of us who show it, we believe in the fundamental, intrinsic value of every human being simply by virtue of being human.

Edited to add: a comment I saw elsewhere: if we are no longer in the land of the free, at least we must be the home of the brave.

Image description: An iceberg floats in water. The view shows both the part of the iceberg above and below the water. The ice berg is topped by a red 'Melt the Ice' hat. Above the water surface is black text listing things being done openly: Rent relief, The Salt Cure, Diaper drives, Donating miles, t-shirts, 3D printed whistles, GoFundMe, Rebel Loon tattoes, signs on telephone poles, too many businesses to list, Safe Haven, Concerts. Below the water surface is a Signal app logo and text in white of things done in secret: rides for immigrants, grocery delivery, the People's Laundry, school patrols, neighborhood patrols, Rapid Response, Can I get a plate check?, donate breast milk, we need a translator, Dispatch.

Menneskeverd

7 Menneskeverd