part two I guess IDK
Jul. 25th, 2010 02:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kleenexwomanOF THINGS I HAVE BEEN DOING.
Thursday night, my friend Charlie came over and we went out to see "Inception." I love spending time with him, especially because I so rarely get to, and it was lovely just to see him. I had definitely been waiting to have an excuse for seeing "Inception," though. It was really well-put-together, and a nice mash-up of genres--I love surreal movies that question reality, and I love heist movies, and it actually managed to blend the concepts seamlessly. The set-up was wonderful, and even the infodumps felt like a natural part of the worldbuilding rather than artificial attempts to produce problems.
The actual portrayal of the dreams seemed oddly lacking, and in retrospect I was disappointed--putting a literal dream world into a movie should give you license to create incredible, surreal landscapes with dream-logic cause and effect. The most satisfying surreal part was the bit with Juno messing around in Jack Dawson's dream--the explosions, the folding of the landscape, the part with the mirror. That was genuinely dreamlike, and I would have loved it if the dream-caper they were pulling on the Scarecrow had featured anything like it.
[ETA: I can never remember the names of characters in movies, so from now on if I get confused I am going to simply refer to them by the names of the characters I most associate with the actor playing them. I'll know who I'm talking about, you'll know who I mean, and the movies will read like terrible crossovers. Everyone wins]
Friday night, my dad's co-worker, Mark Bernstein, was scheduled to throw out the first ball at the Tigers game. So dad drove him there from work and picked me up. We got onto the field to watch batting practice, and it was AWESOME--just watching the players hit one ball after another, joke around with each other and slap each others' asses, doing things to get ready for the game. Johnny Damon actually took a few minutes to chat with and sign autographs for a few little kids who were getting to watch. It was so cool.
Mark had a suite, of course, so we chilled out there and waited for the game to start. And waited. It rained, and rained more, and Dad kept texting Paul Gross (the meteorologist, not the Due South guy--Gross is meteorologist on retainer to the Bernstein law firm, which is really useful when you're doing slip-and-fall cases) and asking him when the weather would let up, and all we got was that it wasn't the kind of storm system where you could predict it. So the game, sadly, was canceled.
Then tonight, I killed off the character I've been playing in the Doctor Who game. She was originally supposed to be a steampunk aristocrat who embodied all of the worst things about the era but was generally helpful. That only worked for a little while. We have a pretty good mix of good, evil, and apathetic characters in the game right now, and inevitably she'd be the character who'd turn the aim of the party from something helpful into something extremely bad. Last game, we ended up in the Captain Planet universe--the DM intended that we assist the Planeteers in stopping Dr. Blight from pouring oil into the ocean, but instead my character decided that she wanted to steal their rings and managed to wrangle most of the other characters into helping her. Fun, yes, but the shtick gets old. What else do you do with a colonialist big-game hunter who considers impoverished orphans to be fuel and enslaves a race of sentient octopods to strip-mine their own planet?
My new character is one of those sentient octopods. His name is Union Boss, possibly to be shortened to Union or maybe Uni or something, because he was supposed to be a one-off in the game and that was a silly name. Maybe I'll keep it as Union Boss, I don't know. Anyway, he's a sentient, psychic, flying octopod with a strong sense of social justice.
Okay, now watch me disappear for another two weeks.
Thursday night, my friend Charlie came over and we went out to see "Inception." I love spending time with him, especially because I so rarely get to, and it was lovely just to see him. I had definitely been waiting to have an excuse for seeing "Inception," though. It was really well-put-together, and a nice mash-up of genres--I love surreal movies that question reality, and I love heist movies, and it actually managed to blend the concepts seamlessly. The set-up was wonderful, and even the infodumps felt like a natural part of the worldbuilding rather than artificial attempts to produce problems.
The actual portrayal of the dreams seemed oddly lacking, and in retrospect I was disappointed--putting a literal dream world into a movie should give you license to create incredible, surreal landscapes with dream-logic cause and effect. The most satisfying surreal part was the bit with Juno messing around in Jack Dawson's dream--the explosions, the folding of the landscape, the part with the mirror. That was genuinely dreamlike, and I would have loved it if the dream-caper they were pulling on the Scarecrow had featured anything like it.
[ETA: I can never remember the names of characters in movies, so from now on if I get confused I am going to simply refer to them by the names of the characters I most associate with the actor playing them. I'll know who I'm talking about, you'll know who I mean, and the movies will read like terrible crossovers. Everyone wins]
Friday night, my dad's co-worker, Mark Bernstein, was scheduled to throw out the first ball at the Tigers game. So dad drove him there from work and picked me up. We got onto the field to watch batting practice, and it was AWESOME--just watching the players hit one ball after another, joke around with each other and slap each others' asses, doing things to get ready for the game. Johnny Damon actually took a few minutes to chat with and sign autographs for a few little kids who were getting to watch. It was so cool.
Mark had a suite, of course, so we chilled out there and waited for the game to start. And waited. It rained, and rained more, and Dad kept texting Paul Gross (the meteorologist, not the Due South guy--Gross is meteorologist on retainer to the Bernstein law firm, which is really useful when you're doing slip-and-fall cases) and asking him when the weather would let up, and all we got was that it wasn't the kind of storm system where you could predict it. So the game, sadly, was canceled.
Then tonight, I killed off the character I've been playing in the Doctor Who game. She was originally supposed to be a steampunk aristocrat who embodied all of the worst things about the era but was generally helpful. That only worked for a little while. We have a pretty good mix of good, evil, and apathetic characters in the game right now, and inevitably she'd be the character who'd turn the aim of the party from something helpful into something extremely bad. Last game, we ended up in the Captain Planet universe--the DM intended that we assist the Planeteers in stopping Dr. Blight from pouring oil into the ocean, but instead my character decided that she wanted to steal their rings and managed to wrangle most of the other characters into helping her. Fun, yes, but the shtick gets old. What else do you do with a colonialist big-game hunter who considers impoverished orphans to be fuel and enslaves a race of sentient octopods to strip-mine their own planet?
My new character is one of those sentient octopods. His name is Union Boss, possibly to be shortened to Union or maybe Uni or something, because he was supposed to be a one-off in the game and that was a silly name. Maybe I'll keep it as Union Boss, I don't know. Anyway, he's a sentient, psychic, flying octopod with a strong sense of social justice.
Okay, now watch me disappear for another two weeks.
