acequeenking (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
acequeenking) wrote2020-02-01 12:12 pm
acequeenking) wrote2020-02-01 12:12 pm
Media Diary: January
One of my new years resolutions was to keep track more of what I’m reading/writing/watching/playing/listening to (a media diary basically). And as you can tell given that it is now 2/1, that has not been going swimmingly.
So to try to make up for lack of time, here’s all of Jan!
What I Read/Am Reading: I finished making my waydowntown through An Introduction to Roman Religion by John Scheid. I’m not entirely sure if it lives up to being an introduction: it pretty much throws you into ancient roman society and expects you’ll know what lares, public cult, peregrini, exogenesis, Greek-cult and Roman-cult and more are without more than a sentence or two of introduction to those topics. I like reading about a lot of this stuff and there were points where I had to look terms up. This book is mostly on the practice of religion: what the religious duties, special occasions, etc. looked like for your average daily roman citizen (or average emperor). Like most introductions, it’s a cursory intro into a lot of customs and it mostly has left me with notes for things for later.
But cool things I have learned:
My library loan request for How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell also came in so I finished that. At first an amusing book – the chapter about Diogenes of Sinope and his cynics is quite a delight – but the latter half of the book became quite a slog. It does a lot to try to explain the way the world is now: how with attention spans ever more divided, combined with a workload similar to those of the nineteen-thirties dockworker and equal uncertainly – what is left for us to pay attention to beyond outrage? Odell’s thesis strikes true to me and my idea of the Millennial Economical Experience –we’re constantly worrying about everything bad in an ever-connected world, one of the last things that can successfully arrest our attention is outrage.
However, what I find less compelling is her call to action, which, despite the book’s cover promising it’s not another “embrace nature and the natural world!” manifesto is…an embrace nature and the natural world manifesto. And while I greatly enjoy nature, I found her explanations of its appeal an absolute drag. She isn’t a strong nature writer. She writes wondering about how anyone could not enjoy the mighty mountains outside their windows, the thoughts of kinds of birds, etc. while not seemingly getting that many people live in areas where nature just isn’t really something that is so close to observe…and certainly mountains and dramatic birds exist in other parts of the country, but they are not by any means universals. She really comes across as your cool upper-middle-class hippie friend, who becomes why the poor people don’t go to the Morcom rose garden while ignoring the very real issues with California’s housing and how an awful lot of people in the eighteen to forty range just don’t have much free time to go anywhere because we as a culture are working ourselves to death. In short, the book is Effective in the first two parts, but I flew through the first two parts in a week and it took the rest of the month to finish the rest. The book also bills itself as a “how to” to improve concentration, but I didn’t come away with anything new from that.
I also read The Queen of Flowers and Roots by “Io” (translated by Rosemary Dawn Allison); this is another romance novel retelling of the Hades and Persephone story. It sticks to the Homeric template (kidnapping and all), but it’s got a lot of fun touches that remind me of Madeline Miller: the gods are all a bit stilted and cold in their way of speaking (compared to the nymphs and Satyrs) – this might be the result of the “translation,” but it works. How the Gods receive worship is quite nice – Persephone sneaks off as a preteen to watch Hades’ cult sacrifice, and sees him standing there (with the helmet on) while minor underworld deities scramble to drink up the blood poured out from the animal’s throat, which is surprisingly creepy for a romance novel. Leuke and Minthe are brought up and used well – as Persephone’s friends and ladies-in-waiting, who she notes with some amusement were later “tangled up” in her and her husband’s story in human interpretations in a way that didn't happen. The Fates’ threads are being weaved into a gigantic mural of the world in this story, with the God’s threads far longer than others and interwoven through the shorter, mortal strings – that is very cool imagery.
The big change in this one is Persephone, after the six month split, opts to instead rebel against Hades, Zeus, and her mother while the other two accept the six month division. She winds up walking the earth hiding from BOTH while Demeter continues to look for her (and a black shadow stalks Demeter – again, cool imagery) and Events Happen that change the world, including the creation of Hecate in a way I had never seen done before.
What I Wrote/am Writing: Deeeep in the weeds on WNSO, the Hadestown fic that never ends. In Act 3 of 3 in this chapter and hoping to finish it tomorrow. Keep debating on if I should finally just tag this as a crossover with Ancient Greek Religion and Lore, since Cronus popping up isn’t exactly keeping to Hadestown canon; otoh, I don’t want to be one of those people who spams AGR&L despite it being Percy Jackson/Lore Olympus/etc. and Hades having a train and their relationship being semi-modern and semi-on the rocks for a good 2/3rds of the fic isn’t typical of the AGR&L canon. So…I probably just talked myself out of it.
I also worked on my Chocolate Box fic, which I can't really talk about but will say I've written four times and am hoping the latest version works out. I'm hoping I'll have time to get three treats done before the collection goes live - fingers crossed!
What Shows I Went to See: I went to see three shows in January:
Phantom of the Opera: An alright production of a classic show. I got to see understudy Christine (Kaitlyn Davis). She has a gorgeous voice, but unfortunately some pretty bad costuming. You can tell that they don't fit her entirely - get this girl a better wardrobe, Phantom! She deserves it. Also nicely voiced is Derrick Davis, the current tour Phantom - he's a campier phantom than some, but I enjoy campy phantoms, so it was a Good Time.
I think what kind of hampered this show was the over-reliance on backdrops over actual, interactable set pieces; the only ones that are kind of cool are the path through the sewer on the way to the Phantom's lair, and the gigantic statue of Apollo that the Phantom/Raoul/Christine use through a couple of songs. The rest is mostly backdrops with just one or two props for the cast to act with. That's not a crippling circumstance (Hadestown does more with less), but it stands out in an Andrew Lloyd Webber spectacle when everyone is just awkwardly standing because the entirety of a set is one back-drop and a piano. I've never seen it on Broadway (maybe next time I go), so I can't comment on if it's the tour cheaping out a bit, or if this is the way it's commonly staged.
Lindiwe: A South African and Chicagoan themed Orpheus and Eurydice; really good, if un poco confusing. I love Nondumiso Tembe's gigantic voice (and Lindiwe's outfits). It's kind of a weird adaption; no Persephone (boo), Hades Dress Sense Honestly Deserves an Award but I'm Not Sure For What (black velvet on black tulle), and Orpheus and Eurydice fight all the time so it kind of feels like "Hadestown, but the entire musical is Chant" - but I really liked it! I'm working on a longer post about it so I'll just say that if it plays again, it's worth seeing despite the mess - especially if you love the story as much as I do.
Mean Girls: Better in the second act than the first, but some of the tropes in it made me feel pretty uncomfortable. I might write a post about it just to sort out my feelings. All the singers on the tour are pretty fantastic despite being young.
What I Watched/am Watching: The only things I’ve watched thus far in January is the final seasons of the Good Place and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (this one might have been late Dec – I am not sure at this point). TROS was rather …disappointing, to me, and I feel like all the reasons why have been Discoursed on the Internet to death, so I will just say I appreciated the hamming of Ian MacDiarmid and Actual Solid Acting from Adam Driver, the rest was a solid meh-to-below-meh, and I’ll move on.
The Good Place – I’m less sure about how I feel about it. I loved Season 1 and 2, but Season 3 felt like the walls were closing in on what was left for the show and this season appears to be mostly shooting us down the runway toward the end. There are parts of this season I’ve loved, but the last episodes seemed to mostly be an info dump, and idk – there’s something dispiriting about the concept of an afterlife (something, by definition, meant to last time immemorial) being dreamed up in about a twenty-minute thought experiment.
(Equally disappointing is that the version they’ve dreamed up is, basically, the late Greco-Roman/Catholic system – life, death, if you are not a particularly great or particularly bad person, purgatory/rebirth until you’re a good enough person to live on. It’s not that it’s not a system I like, obviously I do greatly enjoy the late Greco-Roman version of the afterlife, but – it’s uncomfortable, to me? To go from saying every religion in the world got the afterlife 5% right to basically re-inventing an already well-tred system with different labels? Maybe I’m over thinking it. I do that a lot.)
I’m also a little disappointed by the kind of lazy final act in the penultimate couple of episodes. I don’t like confident! Chidi – not that he exists, per se, but that Chidi overcoming his crippling anxieties seems only possible through the magical process of having 800 versions of himself shoved into himself all at once. As a fellow anxiety sufferer who feels closest to Chidi out of everybody (I am the person handwringing about the almond milk) – it’s a little disappointing that his growth is somewhat artificially done, when Eleanor, Michael and Tahani’s felt more natural. (Jason’s…well, the jury is out on Jason.)
I also felt the "The Good Place is actually full of happiness zombies" plot was a little lazy and didn’t make sense with what we’d seen on the show. The Good Place committee were pushovers, but they weren’t dopamine addicts – and they’re seen here as unaffected by the “happiness zombie” problem. The idea that the solution to perfection forever was not, in fact, being reborn to do the whole thing again but rather a perma-death – feels cynical. And since you don’t introduce a perma-death door without also planning on using said perma-death door, well, I have a feeling the finale is gonna make me cry. Thus far it feels kind of rushed to end and I’m disappointed in that. But I tend to feel differently about the good place once the season is over – so we’ll see.
There’s one episode left for me – it aired last Thursday – but I’m a bit sad that it’s ending, and just can’t bring myself to watch it just yet.
What I Played/am Playing: I played Bastion over the Christmas to New Year’s break, a short game that mostly asks “What do you do after the Apocalypse?” And offers two clear paths for it: rebuild or destroy. Three-fourths of the characters chose one, and the other character chooses the other. Guess who winds up winning? It’s nothing particularly new narratively, but I love the western-fantasy vibe, and the constant narrator who comments on all the nameless child (“the Kid’s”) actions. The music is beautiful, western and world-weary, so I vibed with it pretty hard and uh now I have the soundtrack so lots of lovely, atmospheric writing music for me!
I started Judgment, the Yakuza spin-off, and am having a lot of fun with it, though I haven’t booked a lot of hours on it. So far, the main character, Yagami, fucked up and accidentally let a murderer go free to murder again as a defense attorney; he’s judged as basically an accomplice in Japanese society and making his money running shitty detective jobs instead, like documenting deadbeats who are stiffing their bills and, if necessary, giving them a beat down. Gameplay-wise it’s pretty much Yakuza, but with Ace Attorney’s interface painted on top. I like both of those things, so I like this game!
The Yakuza games tend to be the most m/m heavy ship-generators for me, and I’ve already found a couple in this spin-off. I quite like Yagami’s “coworker” Kaito (an ex mafia guy with the ugliest, flashiest shirt I’ve ever seen outside of the eighties), who has a gentle teasing grace with Yagami and, more importantly for my shipping tastes, falls over himself for the chief prosecutor to such a level it cannot truly be called subtext (“Who was that silver fox? If I was a chick, I’d be all over that”).
I also quite like Yagami with Kyohei Hamura, the Yakuza he’s supposed to defend on trial, and it’s going to be one of those tiny little shipping islands that’s just me, but also, comma, HRGH. Because it’s got this gentle, but complicated-with-power-dynamics malevolence to it, and “tender malevolence” is often the vibe I go for – it’s hitting that Majima/ Sagawa vibe hard, and I’m sure this is gonna be my pool noodle ship, but for the moment, I’m paddlin’.
What I Listened to/am Listening to: Pretty much ¡Spangled! Over and over. I’m in love with Gaby Moreno’s beautiful voice and the lyrics are so bittersweet and that is my trap, the bittersweet music. The first song, Across the Borderline, is both politically relevant and one of the most heartbreaking songs:
The majority of the album is in Spanish (and most of the songs are covers/standards), but the letras are no less compelling:
Oooph, ouch. I know “Nube Gris” is a standard, but OUCH.
The album meant primarily as a meditation on immigration in today’s day and age and is very effective and heartbreaking in this capacity. Also vibing hard with a lot of what I've been writing, so I wouldn't be surprised to see this wind up being a lot of titles in the future. XD;
So to try to make up for lack of time, here’s all of Jan!
What I Read/Am Reading: I finished making my way
But cool things I have learned:
- Things offered to the underworld gods were burnt to nothingness as offerings; unlike with other Roman gods' sacrifices, people didn’t partake of any part of the offering and let it go to ash because Dis Pater demands his full share, evidently.
- Human sacrifice….was not common, but up until the time of Pliny the Elder was sometimes used as a desperate strategy to appease the gods, particularly underworld gods.
- When the Romans had a city that they didn’t particularly like/were at war with, they would consecrate that city to Pluto and Proserpina and other chthonic deities. Why? Because they assumed the underworld deities would be “eager” for the new tributes and would run along and gobble them up which is a) horrific when you consider they really believed in those gods, and b) kind of hilarious to imagine happening. I just keep picturing Hades trying to tug an elephant from Carthage all the way down to the underworld while Persephone tells him they really don’t need it.
My library loan request for How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell also came in so I finished that. At first an amusing book – the chapter about Diogenes of Sinope and his cynics is quite a delight – but the latter half of the book became quite a slog. It does a lot to try to explain the way the world is now: how with attention spans ever more divided, combined with a workload similar to those of the nineteen-thirties dockworker and equal uncertainly – what is left for us to pay attention to beyond outrage? Odell’s thesis strikes true to me and my idea of the Millennial Economical Experience –we’re constantly worrying about everything bad in an ever-connected world, one of the last things that can successfully arrest our attention is outrage.
However, what I find less compelling is her call to action, which, despite the book’s cover promising it’s not another “embrace nature and the natural world!” manifesto is…an embrace nature and the natural world manifesto. And while I greatly enjoy nature, I found her explanations of its appeal an absolute drag. She isn’t a strong nature writer. She writes wondering about how anyone could not enjoy the mighty mountains outside their windows, the thoughts of kinds of birds, etc. while not seemingly getting that many people live in areas where nature just isn’t really something that is so close to observe…and certainly mountains and dramatic birds exist in other parts of the country, but they are not by any means universals. She really comes across as your cool upper-middle-class hippie friend, who becomes why the poor people don’t go to the Morcom rose garden while ignoring the very real issues with California’s housing and how an awful lot of people in the eighteen to forty range just don’t have much free time to go anywhere because we as a culture are working ourselves to death. In short, the book is Effective in the first two parts, but I flew through the first two parts in a week and it took the rest of the month to finish the rest. The book also bills itself as a “how to” to improve concentration, but I didn’t come away with anything new from that.
I also read The Queen of Flowers and Roots by “Io” (translated by Rosemary Dawn Allison); this is another romance novel retelling of the Hades and Persephone story. It sticks to the Homeric template (kidnapping and all), but it’s got a lot of fun touches that remind me of Madeline Miller: the gods are all a bit stilted and cold in their way of speaking (compared to the nymphs and Satyrs) – this might be the result of the “translation,” but it works. How the Gods receive worship is quite nice – Persephone sneaks off as a preteen to watch Hades’ cult sacrifice, and sees him standing there (with the helmet on) while minor underworld deities scramble to drink up the blood poured out from the animal’s throat, which is surprisingly creepy for a romance novel. Leuke and Minthe are brought up and used well – as Persephone’s friends and ladies-in-waiting, who she notes with some amusement were later “tangled up” in her and her husband’s story in human interpretations in a way that didn't happen. The Fates’ threads are being weaved into a gigantic mural of the world in this story, with the God’s threads far longer than others and interwoven through the shorter, mortal strings – that is very cool imagery.
The big change in this one is Persephone, after the six month split, opts to instead rebel against Hades, Zeus, and her mother while the other two accept the six month division. She winds up walking the earth hiding from BOTH while Demeter continues to look for her (and a black shadow stalks Demeter – again, cool imagery) and Events Happen that change the world, including the creation of Hecate in a way I had never seen done before.
What really hampers this though, is that there are just – there are so many typos. Some of them are downright cringy (“Orfyeus”; Hades spends the first few mentions as “Pluto” and then abruptly switches to “Hades”). Some sentences end far too soon, with three or four words falling into a great abyss and then on to the next sentence. It’s basically decent fanfic, and I enjoyed it, but the typos in it really could use a fix. Typos are excusable in fanfic but really shouldn't be in a pro-fic.
What I Wrote/am Writing: Deeeep in the weeds on WNSO, the Hadestown fic that never ends. In Act 3 of 3 in this chapter and hoping to finish it tomorrow. Keep debating on if I should finally just tag this as a crossover with Ancient Greek Religion and Lore, since Cronus popping up isn’t exactly keeping to Hadestown canon; otoh, I don’t want to be one of those people who spams AGR&L despite it being Percy Jackson/Lore Olympus/etc. and Hades having a train and their relationship being semi-modern and semi-on the rocks for a good 2/3rds of the fic isn’t typical of the AGR&L canon. So…I probably just talked myself out of it.
I also worked on my Chocolate Box fic, which I can't really talk about but will say I've written four times and am hoping the latest version works out. I'm hoping I'll have time to get three treats done before the collection goes live - fingers crossed!
What Shows I Went to See: I went to see three shows in January:
Phantom of the Opera: An alright production of a classic show. I got to see understudy Christine (Kaitlyn Davis). She has a gorgeous voice, but unfortunately some pretty bad costuming. You can tell that they don't fit her entirely - get this girl a better wardrobe, Phantom! She deserves it. Also nicely voiced is Derrick Davis, the current tour Phantom - he's a campier phantom than some, but I enjoy campy phantoms, so it was a Good Time.
I think what kind of hampered this show was the over-reliance on backdrops over actual, interactable set pieces; the only ones that are kind of cool are the path through the sewer on the way to the Phantom's lair, and the gigantic statue of Apollo that the Phantom/Raoul/Christine use through a couple of songs. The rest is mostly backdrops with just one or two props for the cast to act with. That's not a crippling circumstance (Hadestown does more with less), but it stands out in an Andrew Lloyd Webber spectacle when everyone is just awkwardly standing because the entirety of a set is one back-drop and a piano. I've never seen it on Broadway (maybe next time I go), so I can't comment on if it's the tour cheaping out a bit, or if this is the way it's commonly staged.
Lindiwe: A South African and Chicagoan themed Orpheus and Eurydice; really good, if un poco confusing. I love Nondumiso Tembe's gigantic voice (and Lindiwe's outfits). It's kind of a weird adaption; no Persephone (boo), Hades Dress Sense Honestly Deserves an Award but I'm Not Sure For What (black velvet on black tulle), and Orpheus and Eurydice fight all the time so it kind of feels like "Hadestown, but the entire musical is Chant" - but I really liked it! I'm working on a longer post about it so I'll just say that if it plays again, it's worth seeing despite the mess - especially if you love the story as much as I do.
Mean Girls: Better in the second act than the first, but some of the tropes in it made me feel pretty uncomfortable. I might write a post about it just to sort out my feelings. All the singers on the tour are pretty fantastic despite being young.
What I Watched/am Watching: The only things I’ve watched thus far in January is the final seasons of the Good Place and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (this one might have been late Dec – I am not sure at this point). TROS was rather …disappointing, to me, and I feel like all the reasons why have been Discoursed on the Internet to death, so I will just say I appreciated the hamming of Ian MacDiarmid and Actual Solid Acting from Adam Driver, the rest was a solid meh-to-below-meh, and I’ll move on.
The Good Place – I’m less sure about how I feel about it. I loved Season 1 and 2, but Season 3 felt like the walls were closing in on what was left for the show and this season appears to be mostly shooting us down the runway toward the end. There are parts of this season I’ve loved, but the last episodes seemed to mostly be an info dump, and idk – there’s something dispiriting about the concept of an afterlife (something, by definition, meant to last time immemorial) being dreamed up in about a twenty-minute thought experiment.
(Equally disappointing is that the version they’ve dreamed up is, basically, the late Greco-Roman/Catholic system – life, death, if you are not a particularly great or particularly bad person, purgatory/rebirth until you’re a good enough person to live on. It’s not that it’s not a system I like, obviously I do greatly enjoy the late Greco-Roman version of the afterlife, but – it’s uncomfortable, to me? To go from saying every religion in the world got the afterlife 5% right to basically re-inventing an already well-tred system with different labels? Maybe I’m over thinking it. I do that a lot.)
I’m also a little disappointed by the kind of lazy final act in the penultimate couple of episodes. I don’t like confident! Chidi – not that he exists, per se, but that Chidi overcoming his crippling anxieties seems only possible through the magical process of having 800 versions of himself shoved into himself all at once. As a fellow anxiety sufferer who feels closest to Chidi out of everybody (I am the person handwringing about the almond milk) – it’s a little disappointing that his growth is somewhat artificially done, when Eleanor, Michael and Tahani’s felt more natural. (Jason’s…well, the jury is out on Jason.)
I also felt the "The Good Place is actually full of happiness zombies" plot was a little lazy and didn’t make sense with what we’d seen on the show. The Good Place committee were pushovers, but they weren’t dopamine addicts – and they’re seen here as unaffected by the “happiness zombie” problem. The idea that the solution to perfection forever was not, in fact, being reborn to do the whole thing again but rather a perma-death – feels cynical. And since you don’t introduce a perma-death door without also planning on using said perma-death door, well, I have a feeling the finale is gonna make me cry. Thus far it feels kind of rushed to end and I’m disappointed in that. But I tend to feel differently about the good place once the season is over – so we’ll see.
There’s one episode left for me – it aired last Thursday – but I’m a bit sad that it’s ending, and just can’t bring myself to watch it just yet.
What I Played/am Playing: I played Bastion over the Christmas to New Year’s break, a short game that mostly asks “What do you do after the Apocalypse?” And offers two clear paths for it: rebuild or destroy. Three-fourths of the characters chose one, and the other character chooses the other. Guess who winds up winning? It’s nothing particularly new narratively, but I love the western-fantasy vibe, and the constant narrator who comments on all the nameless child (“the Kid’s”) actions. The music is beautiful, western and world-weary, so I vibed with it pretty hard and uh now I have the soundtrack so lots of lovely, atmospheric writing music for me!
I started Judgment, the Yakuza spin-off, and am having a lot of fun with it, though I haven’t booked a lot of hours on it. So far, the main character, Yagami, fucked up and accidentally let a murderer go free to murder again as a defense attorney; he’s judged as basically an accomplice in Japanese society and making his money running shitty detective jobs instead, like documenting deadbeats who are stiffing their bills and, if necessary, giving them a beat down. Gameplay-wise it’s pretty much Yakuza, but with Ace Attorney’s interface painted on top. I like both of those things, so I like this game!
The Yakuza games tend to be the most m/m heavy ship-generators for me, and I’ve already found a couple in this spin-off. I quite like Yagami’s “coworker” Kaito (an ex mafia guy with the ugliest, flashiest shirt I’ve ever seen outside of the eighties), who has a gentle teasing grace with Yagami and, more importantly for my shipping tastes, falls over himself for the chief prosecutor to such a level it cannot truly be called subtext (“Who was that silver fox? If I was a chick, I’d be all over that”).
I also quite like Yagami with Kyohei Hamura, the Yakuza he’s supposed to defend on trial, and it’s going to be one of those tiny little shipping islands that’s just me, but also, comma, HRGH. Because it’s got this gentle, but complicated-with-power-dynamics malevolence to it, and “tender malevolence” is often the vibe I go for – it’s hitting that Majima/ Sagawa vibe hard, and I’m sure this is gonna be my pool noodle ship, but for the moment, I’m paddlin’.
What I Listened to/am Listening to: Pretty much ¡Spangled! Over and over. I’m in love with Gaby Moreno’s beautiful voice and the lyrics are so bittersweet and that is my trap, the bittersweet music. The first song, Across the Borderline, is both politically relevant and one of the most heartbreaking songs:
When you reach the broken promised land
And every dream slips through your hands
Then you'll know that it's too late to change your mind
'Cause you've paid the price to come so far
Just to wind up where you are.
The majority of the album is in Spanish (and most of the songs are covers/standards), but the letras are no less compelling:
Si me alejo de ti es porque he comprendido/- If I distance myself from you, it is because I have understood
Que soy la nube gris que nubla tu camino/ that I am the grey cloud that shades your way
Me voy para dejar que cambie tu destino//I am leaving, so that you can change your destiny
Que seas muy feliz mientras yo busco el mí / so that you will be very happy while I look for my [happiness]
Oooph, ouch. I know “Nube Gris” is a standard, but OUCH.
The album meant primarily as a meditation on immigration in today’s day and age and is very effective and heartbreaking in this capacity. Also vibing hard with a lot of what I've been writing, so I wouldn't be surprised to see this wind up being a lot of titles in the future. XD;