trill_gutterbug

Ben + Johnny + Sex Pollen = fic.

Which, surprisingly, I haven't seen in any version, though it's probably on LJ or something.

muccamukk

As a follow up to bitching about this in the last post, I thought I'd look and see where I was with watching some of these. The movies are in order they came out. The TV shows are sorta just stuck in there for the year they started, rather than breaking them up by season. I'm too lazy to look up the details of exactly when they aired (especially as I don't even remember some of these existed). I'm only including live action films and tv shows. ( Long list is long )

muccamukk

Going to the Movies!

(Success Rate: 1.5 out of 4)

In May, we tried to go to Sinners at Local Theatre #1, only to find none of their caption machines were working.

In June, we didn't bother trying.

In July, we tried to go to Superman at Local Theatre #2, only to find that they didn't have caption machines at all. In 2025.

Later in July, while visiting my parents, we went to their Local Theatre to see Superman, only to have multiple caption machines crap out part way through the movie, leaving Nenya to finish it on their speech to text app (an imperfect experience).

This week, I went back to Local Theatre #1 and asked in person if the caption machines were now working (they neither answer the phone, nor call people back if you leave a message). Being assured they were, we booked tickets to The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The first caption machine Nenya got didn't even turn on, but the next one made it through the whole entire movie! Diversity win! (Or something.)

Actual movie thoughts aren't that deep, but it's superhero films, so...

Superman (2025)

So I'm more of a Marvel Girl, though I did like the first Wonder Woman movie and Blue Beetle, but Nenya grew up on the Christopher Reeve movies, and this had been advertised as More Like That, so we decided to give it a go.

It was really fun! I thought the casting was great, and I'm really enjoying the "superheroes' lives are inherently ridiculous" vibe we're currently going with. Also: death to origin stories! It was really nice to see the Justice League International gang (lol), and have a Superman who was doing the Big Blue Boyscout thing in earnest. (I thought

Princess_Weekes' video Quentin Tarantino Accidentally Broke Superman had great insights about why people got on the wrong track with the character.) It was silly and had heart, and didn't have joyless desaturation, and I'm here for all of this.

Will happily come back for the Supergirl movie, and am even more invested in season two of Peacemaker.

The Fantastic Four: The First Steps (2025)

I really liked the retro-futurist aesthetic, and was happy they didn't combine them with 1960s inequalities. Also: space! I haven't seen any of the cast in a whole lot, but thought they were great for the roles. Pascal was fully on point as Reed, and managed to capture his pathos without diving head first into manpain, and I really liked Reed/Sue here. I just like his face, also. They toned down Johnny's womanising into a low-key romance that actually worked for me, though even putting Natasha Lyonne in it didn't make Ben's crush that interesting (mostly because we got 2.5 minutes of time with that plot). Given all the natalism in the air, I'm a bit twitchy about movies focused around babies, but I liked that they didn't even consider that Sue couldn't go on the mission while eight months pregnant. I will riot if we don't get Valeria, though.

Which kind of brings me to the mid-credits scene. ( Spoilers for where this fits in the MCU? )

(Looking at AO3, it seems like people are into ~~Eddie Munson~~ Johnny het, either with the Silver Surfer or with Y/N. Though there is also some team!fic with woobie!Johnny. There's like two Ben/Johnny fic, which is surprising as they had a nice vibe in this, and it used to be the big ship. I'd also like more Reed!whump than I found, but early days.)

Department of "But It's Still Weird that It Happened Twice"

( Mild spoilers for both films )

osprey_archer

Earlier this year, I read Max in the House of Spies, a novel about a twelve-year-old German Jewish refugee who escapes Germany on a kindertransport… then does everything in his power to get sent back as a spy so he can try to save his parents.

I had a number of criticisms of Max in the House of Spies. (You can also read

skygiants wrote a review here.) My biggest criticism was that it saddles Max with a dybbuk and a kobold on his shoulders, who serve no particular purpose but to Statler and Waldorf about how recruiting a twelve-year-old spy is in fact a terrible idea. Of course they have a point, but let’s be real, when I picked up a book about a twelve-year-old spy, I did it in the spirit of “Damn the realism! Full spy ahead!”

And when Max in the Land of Lies begins, we are indeed going full spy ahead!

( Spoilers )

muccamukk

I've been knitting and watching shows, which has led me to try to find stuff that's good to watch while crafting, especially things on Kanopy.

I was going to do a bunch of these in a post, but the first got long, so stand by for further knitting show thoughts.

North and South (2004)

(I haven't read the book, though I keep meaning to get into Elizabeth Gaskell, who is recommended when you run out of George Eliot.)

A star crossed romance between Daniela Denby-Ashe as an impoverished daughter of an auto-defrocked churchman from Hampshire, and Richard Armitage as a self-made cotton mill owner in ~~Lancashire~~ "Darkshire"* (amazing name, thank you, Mrs Gaskell). He's in the middle of putting down a strike, and she's in the middle of being appalled by the violence of literally everything that's happening. The main attachment between them seems to be that they are both stunningly beautiful, and appear even more attractive when they are sad. Which they are a lot.

So... he's a strike-breaking mill owner in 1855, who sets the army on his workers? (Which they are careful not to show in detail because it might distract us from how very beautiful Richard Armitage is when he's sad.) Absolutely no one talks about where all the cotton's coming from, other than "America."† He does, later in the show, come to be more sympathetic to the workers, and start actually talking to them and shit, but the strikebreaking is a lot to get past. If you're likely to spend much of the show humming "The Internationale," then maybe give this a skip. If you don't mind/can ignore that, the pining is excellent, and the actors are very beautiful.

Quality as knitting show: 4/5, would knit to this again.

( End Notes )

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

As per

lucymonster’s recommendation, I read Susan J. Eischeid’s Mistress of Life and Death: The Dark Journey of Maria Mandl, Head Overseer of the Women’s Camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a compulsively readable though very grim book about how a nice German girl rose to head overseer at Auschwitz. Alongside her usual concentration camp duties, Mandl started an orchestra among the prisoners, partly as a bid for status (one in the ear of the male guards, if you will), but also out of a genuine love of music.

There’s a general western cultural belief that art appreciation of all kinds should be morally uplifting, so one might be tempted to infer from this that Mandl was a rare spark of humanity among the camp apparatus. This is absolutely not so. Mandl was famously vicious, and her other interests included kicking prisoners to death and riding through camp like a Valkyrie just to show off her power.

I picked up Simon Barnes’ How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher on a whim from a display in the library, and found it an absolute delight! Barnes offers a few tips for the novice birdwatcher (acquire binoculars), but mostly the book is about the joy that watching birds in even the most incidental way can bring to your life: the thrill of Canada geese returning in spring, that wonderful moment when a hawk swoops down and you thrill to its power and majesty.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, which I’m not loving as much as I’d hoped, but it’s still early days so perhaps it will grow on me.

What I Plan to Read Next

I picked up Kimberly Newton Fusco’s The Secret of Honeycake on a whim because I liked the cover. We shall see what we shall see!

muccamukk

Reading from

thewitchoftheforest.

1. What needs harvesting in my life?
The Fool

2. What is blooming and coming to fruition?
Six of Wands

3. What needs more time to grow?
King of Discs

4. How can I nurture myself now?
Seven of Swords

5. Ways my harvest will help others.
The Devil

I love the idea of the Fool as a harvest, and the Devil as helping others.

osprey_archer

I posted a while back that Julius Caesar was “my first and oldest Shakespearian love,” which in one sense in true, but in another sense is tragic A Comedy of Errors erasure.

When I was in junior high, the local university put on a production of A Comedy of Errors, which my mother and I loved so much that we invited my best friend and her mother to see it with us the next weekend. And then (I only learned this recently) apparently my mother snuck out one day and watched it yet another time, while I was at school! You can see why she didn’t inform me of this traitorous plan. Watching A Comedy of Errors without me indeed!

So of course I was delighted when I saw that one of the Indianapolis Shakespeare companies was going to Shakespeare-in-the-park A Comedy of Errors this summer. I retained dim memories of the plot (to be fair, the plot is basically “Two sets of identical twins separated at birth! SHENANIGANS!”) but intense memories of the hilarity, and I am happy to say that Shakespeare in the park delivered.

That formative junior high production was set more or less when and where the play was originally set, and featured actors who genuinely might be mistaken for each other as the twins. The Shakespeare-in-the-park version is set in Daytona Beach in 1984 (but a version of 1984 where you can’t contact the Coast Guard or otherwise use a telephone to try to track down your lost wife and children when you are all tragically separated in a shipwreck), and raised many chuckles by replacing the place names with cities around the Gulf of Mexico: Boca Raton, Cuba, Venice Beach.

(The merchant who is from Syracuse in the original is here from Venice Beach, and in perhaps a nod at The Merchant of Venice, dressed like the Rabbi from Robin Hood: Men in Tights, while everyone else is running around in Hawaiian shirts. Props to the actor for running around in a long coat on a hot humid evening.)

Also, every time they go to “the mart,” they replaced it with “Kmart.” I believe Shakespeare would have approved this pandering to the giggling crowd.

Also, the twins in this production were only vaguely similar, but dressed alike so you could definitely tell who was twin to whom. The Dromios were cross-cast, but the characters were still male, which made for a very funny moment near the beginning of the play right after the Dromios have been “born” (to a character who was pregnant with a beach ball): “male twins,” emphasizes the Merchant of Venice Beach who is narrating this flashback, and at once the Dromios slouch into a masculine posture and one of them grunts, “Whiskey club.”

All in all, just a grand old time, the kind of slapstick hilarity that you can enjoy even as a thirteen-year-old who is a little bit vague about what a lot of this Shakespearian language means.

Also, although I have at this point seen a number of Shakespeares, this was my first Shakespeare in the Park experience. We brought along a picnic and drank three bottles of wine between the four of us and had a wonderful time.

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Another Newbery! Lois Lenski’s Phebe Fairchild Her Book, which is set in Connecticut in the 1830s and features Phebe Fairchild, sent from the port of New Haven to stay with her Puritan farming cousins upstate, where she has to hide her Mother Goose because the Puritan farming cousins do not approve of silly rhymes. Phebe learns some farming skills, the Puritan cousins learn to unbend a bit, and a good time was had by all.

I’ve vaguely meant to read Liz Kessler’s The Tail of Emily Windsnap for years, and then

troisoiseaux posted about it, and then

asakiyume decided to read it (and later posted about it too), so obviously its time had come.

Unfortunately, I think I just waited way too long on this book. I might have liked it better if I had read it back in 2003, when I was still reasonably young and impressionable, although I might equally have been even more annoyed by the fact that mermaid society is not a thoroughly worldbuilt society in its own right, but merely an underwater reflection of the land world. The court stenographer may be writing her report in squid ink, and the presiding judge may be the King of the Mermaids himself, but otherwise the court functions exactly like a law court on a TV show.

What I’m Reading Now

Nearing the end of Lord Peter. Read the MOST HORRIFYING story this week, in which ( spoilers )

What I Plan to Read Next

Two Newbery books left to go! The project is almost complete, a mere seven years after it began!

muccamukk

(Up for adoption, if anyone wants it.)

We were just rewatching the last two episodes, and ( Spoilers for 1x09 )

osprey_archer

Daphne du Maurier’s Enchanted Cornwall: Her Pictorial Memoir is a little bit a memoir about du Maurier’s life, but mostly about her lifelong love affair with Cornwall and the many books that she set there. The book was published near the end of her life (perhaps posthumously?) and is thus padded out with long excerpts from those books, most of which I skipped because either (a) I had read the book and therefore didn’t need to reread the excerpt, or (b) I hadn’t read the book and didn’t want to be spoiled, but nonetheless a good read because it’s full of interesting tidbits. For instance:

J. M. Barrie was du Maurier’s uncle and her older sister Alice played Wendy in one production of Peter Pan.

(There are some other connections that I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it certainly confirmed my feeling that the entirety of the early 20th century British art world - art encompassing theater, painting, writing, etc - was in fact one extended social network where everyone knew everyone and half of them were related by marriage.)

During the filming of Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock referred to the (nameless) main character as Daphne de Winter, an identification which du Maurier cheerfully accepts.

Although the grounds of Manderley were based on the grounds of du Maurier’s beloved Menabilly, the house itself was based on a different country house, Milton.

Although du Maurier recounts her courtship with her husband (which seems to have loosely inspired Frenchman’s Creek), the real love story of this book is with Menabilly. Du Maurier devotes an entire chapter to wooing and winning the house. The distant glimpses from sea and land. The first visit, cut short when an early darkness descends while du Maurier and her sister approach the house on the winding forested front drive. The second visit, when du Maurier rose before dawn to approach by the sea. Repeated visits to explore the grounds, culminating at last in a visit where du Maurier found a window open, and climbed in to explore the crumbling abandoned house…

All this culminated in du Maurier securing the house for a twenty-five year rental, begun during World War II. Everyone told her that she’d never be able to repair the roof, get electricity installed, or otherwise render the place habitable, and she proved all of them wrong.

Du Maurier considered Frenchman’s Creek her only really romantic book. So if you’ve ever read her other books and wondered “Am I supposed to consider this horror show of a couple romantic?”, the answer is apparently no!

osprey_archer

My romp through the archives continues! This time, I read Zhenya Gay’s Sakimura, a picture book about Gay’s real-life Siamese cat Sakimura (usually called Saki). She drew this cat from life, and you can tell, because he’s just bursting with life, individuality, and cattish charm.

Saki, in the story, is a cat with everything a cat could want. He has a yellow water bowl and a green food bowl, which is filled daily with cubes of raw beef. (This was before the days of kibble, and a cat could live well.) He has a catnip mouse and a ball and a window where he can watch people pass by on the street.

But what he doesn’t have is a friend. And so Saki sneaks out and traipses away into the woods, where he tries to befriend a bird, and a squirrel, and three fat frogs, whereupon he falls into a pond with a splash and decides (after paddling frantically to shore) that perhaps the woods is not the best place to find a friend.

So he goes on, and finds a farmhouse, where he is too big to befriend the ducks and the chickens and too small to befriend the horses and cows. After a long drink of milk, he decides to take just one last look for a friend…

…whereupon he finds a tiger cat sunning on the porch! They take one look at each other and are bosom friends. They run and play on the lawn, and then when they are tired they curl up to sleep.

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Page generated Aug. 9th, 2025 11:10 pm

an author, in the pejorative sense

Reading

Just a thought...

Mucca & The Marvel Cinematic Universe

Superhero Summer of 2025

Going to the Movies!

Superman (2025)

The Fantastic Four: The First Steps (2025)

Department of "But It's Still Weird that It Happened Twice"

Book Review: Max in the Land of Lies

Are all in the North. It's Grim Up North.

Wednesday Reading Meme

Reading for Lughnasadh

A Comedy of Errors

Wednesday Reading Meme

Murderbot TV plot bunny

Book Review: Enchanted Cornwall

Picture Book Monday: Sakimura

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December 2018

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