(no subject)

Jun. 6th, 2025 08:18 pm
skygiants: Autor from Princess Tutu gesturing smugly (let me splain)
[personal profile] skygiants
A while back, [personal profile] lirazel posted about a bad book about an interesting topic -- Conspiracy Theories About Lemuria -- which apparently got most of its information from a scholarly text called The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy.

Great! I said. I bet the library has that book, I'll read it instead of the bad one! which now I have done.

For those unfamiliar, for a while the idea of sunken land-bridges joining various existing landmasses was very popular in 19th century geology; Lemuria got its name because it was supposed to explain why there are lemurs in Madagascar and India but not anywhere else. Various other land-bridges were also theorized but Lemuria's the only one that got famous thanks to the catchy name getting picked up by various weird occultists (most notably Helena Blavatasky) and incorporated into their variably incomprehensible Theories of Human Origins, Past Paradises, Etc.

As is not unexpected, this book is a much more dense, scholarly, and theory-driven tome than the bad pop history that [personal profile] lirazel read. What was unexpected for me is that the author's scholarly interests focus on a.) cartography and b.) Tamil language and cultural politics, and so what she's most interested in doing is tracing how the concept of a Lemurian continent went from being an outdated geographic supposition to a weird Western occult fringe belief to an extremely mainstream, government-supported historical narrative in Tamil-speaking polities, where Lost Lemuria has become associated with the legendary drowned Tamil homeland of Tamilnāṭu and thus the premise for a claim that not only is the Lemurian continent the source of human origins but that specifically the Tamil language is the source language for humanity.

Not the book I expected to be reading! but I'm not at all mad about how things turned out! the prose is so dry that it was definite work to wade through but the rewards were real; the author has another whole book about Tamil language politics and part of me knows I am not really theory-brained enough for it at this time but the other part is tempted.

Also I did as well come out with a few snippets of the Weird Nonsense that I thought I was going in for! My favorite anecdote involves a woman named Gertrude Norris Meeker who wrote to the U.S. government in the 1950s claiming to be the Governor-General of Atlantis and Lemuria, ascertaining her sovereign right to this nonexistent territory, to which the State Department's Special Advisor on Geography had to write back like "we do not think that is true; this place does not exist." Eventually Gertrude Meeker got a congressman involved who also nobly wrote to the government on behalf of his constituent: "Mrs. Meeker understands that by renouncing her citizenship she could become Queen of these islands, but as a citizen she can rule as governor-general. [...] She states that she is getting ready to do some leasing for development work on some of these islands." And again the State Department was patiently like "we do not think that is true, as this place does not exist." Subsequently they seem to have developed a "Lemuria and Atlantis are not real" form letter which I hope and trust is still being used today.

(no subject)

Jun. 4th, 2025 08:47 pm
skygiants: Jane Eyre from Paula Rego's illustrations, facing out into darkness (more than courage)
[personal profile] skygiants
Over Memorial Day weekend [personal profile] genarti and I were on a mini-vacation at her family's cabin in the Finger Lakes, which features a fantastic bookshelf of yellowing midcentury mysteries stocked by [personal profile] genarti's grandmother. Often when I'm there I just avail myself of the existing material, but this time -- in increasing awareness of the way our own books are threatening to spill over our shelves again -- I seized this as an opportunity to check my bookshelves for the books that looked most like they belonged in a cabin in the Finger Lakes to read while I was there and then leave among their brethren.

As a result, I have now finally read the second-to-last of the stock of Weird Joan Aikens that [personal profile] coffeeandink gave me many years ago now, and boy was it extremely weird!

My favorite Aiken books are often the ones where I straight up can't tell if she's attempting to sincerely Write in the Genre or if she is writing full deadpan parody. I think The Embroidered Sunset is at least half parody, in a deadpan and melancholy way. I actually have a hypothesis that someone asked Joan Aiken to write a Gothic, meaning the sort of romantic suspense girl-flees-from-house form of the genre popular in the 1970s, and she was like "great! I love the Gothic tradition! I will give you a plucky 1970s career girl and a mystery and a complex family history and several big creepy houses! would you also like a haunted seaside landscape, the creeping inevitability of loss and death, some barely-dodged incest and a tragic ending?" and Gollancz, weary of Joan Aiken and her antics, was just like "sure, Joan. Fine. Do whatever."

Our heroine, Lucy, is a talented, sensible, cross and rather ugly girl with notably weird front teeth, is frequently jokingly referred to as Lucy Snowe by one of her love interests; the big creepy old age home in which much of the novel takes place is called Wildfell Hall; at one point Lucy knocks on the front door of Old Colonel Linton and he's like 'oh my god! you look just like my great-grandmother Cathy Linton, nee Earnshaw! it's the notably weird front teeth!" Joan Will Have Her Little Jokes.

The plot? The plot. Lucy, an orphan being raised in New England by her evil uncle and his hapless wife and mean daughter, wants to go study music in England with the brilliant-but-tragically-dying refugee pianist Max Benovek. Her uncle pays her fare across the Atlantic, on the condition that she go and investigate a great-aunt who has been pulling a pension out of the family coffers for many years; the great-aunt was Living Long Term with Another Old Lady (the L word is not said but it is really felt) and one of them has now died, but no one is really clear which.

The evil uncle suspects that the surviving old lady may not be the great-aunt and may instead be Doing Fraud, so Lucy's main task is to locate the old lady and determine whether or not she is in fact her great-aunt. Additionally, the great aunt was a brilliant folk artist unrecognized in her own time and so the evil uncle has assigned Lucy a side quest of finding as many of her paintings as possible and bringing them back to be sold for many dollars.

However, before setting out on any of these quests, Lucy stops in on the dying refugee pianist to see if he will agree to teach her. They have an immediate meeting of the minds and souls! Not only does Max agree to take her on as His Last Pupil, he also immediately furnishes her with cash and a car, because her plan of hitchhiking down to Aunt Fennel's part of the UK could endanger her beautiful pianist's hands!! Now Lucy has a brilliant future ahead of her with someone who really cares about her, but also a ticking clock: she has to sort out this whole great-aunt business before Max progresses from 'tragically dying' to 'tragically dead.'

The rest of the book follows several threads:
- Lucy bopping around the World's Most Depressing Seaside Towns, which, it is ominously and repeatedly hinted, could flood catastraphically at any moment, grimly attempting to convince a series of incredibly weird and variably depressed locals to give her any information or paintings, which they are deeply disinclined to do
- Max, in his sickroom, reading Lucy's letters and going 'gosh I hope I get to teach that girl ... it would be my last and most important life's work .... BEFORE I DIE'
- Sinister Goings On At The Old Age Home! Escaped Convicts!! Secret Identities!!! What Could This All Have To Do With Lucy's Evil Uncle? Who Could Say! Is Their Doctor Faking Being Turkish? Who Could Say!! Why Does That One Old Woman Keep Holding Up An Electric Mixer And Remarking How Easy It Would Be To Murder Someone With It? Who Could Say That Either!!!
- an elderly woman who may or may not be Aunt Fennel, in terrible fear of Something, stacked into dingy and constrained settings packed with other old and fading strangers, trying not to think too hard about her dead partner and their beloved cat and the life that she used to have in her own home where she was happy and loved .... all of these sections genuinely gave me big emotions :(((

Eventually all these plotlines converge with increasingly chaotic drama! Lucy and the old lady meet and have a really interesting, affectionate but complicated relationship colored by deep loneliness and suspicion on both sides; again, I really genuinely cared about this! Lucy, who sometimes exhibits random psychic tendencies, visits the lesbian cottage and finds it is so powerfully and miserably haunted by the happiness that it once held and doesn't anymore that she nearly passes out about it! Then whole thing culminates in huge spoilers )

Anyway. A wild time. Some parts I liked very much! I hit the end and shrieked and then forced Beth to read it immediately because I needed to scream about it, and now it lives among its other yellowing paperback friends on the Midcentury Mysteries shelf for some other unsuspecting person to find and scream about.

NB: in addition to everything else a cat dies in this book .... Joan Aiken hates this cat in particular and I do not know why. She likes all the other cats! But for some reason she really wants us to understand that this cat has bad vibes and we should not be sad when it gets got. But me, I was sad.

(no subject)

May. 30th, 2025 11:23 pm
skygiants: Rue from Princess Tutu dancing with a raven (belle et la bete)
[personal profile] skygiants
The Boston Ballet production of Maillot's Romeo et Juliette has turned out to be not only my favorite Boston Ballet production that I've seen so far but also tbh one of my favorite Romeo and Juliets full stop. It is Taking Swings and Making Choices and some of them are very weird but all of them are interesting.

we're just gonna go ahead and cut for length )

Look For The Light

May. 30th, 2025 05:52 pm
netgirl_y2k: (Default)
[personal profile] netgirl_y2k
I'm trying to post here more. Sorry about that.

So I finished the second season of The Last of Us, a season of television that was...fine. There wasn't a single outright bad episode; there also wasn't an out and out banger like the Bill and Frank episode from S1, where it felt like they'd remembered that this was a television show and not a video game and took advantage of that. If anything, I thought it hewed too close to the game. And I say this as someone who liked the game - and by 'liked' I mean I played it to credits, broadly enjoyed the experience, and didn't go immediately insane and spend the next five years screaming into a front facing iPhone camera like a total weirdo.

And there were a few things that I thought the show did better than the game. The first was the attack on Jackson, which I though was pretty epic set piece. The second was Eugene's fate, in the game he's just an old guy who likes weed and has died of a stroke, here he serves as a neat bit of unflattering characterisation for both how cold Joel can be and how selfish Ellie can be, and marks the real beginning of their relationship breakdown. The third was Jesse, who is the very definition of an npc in the game, he has no strong feelings about his girlfriend dumping him for Ellie, about becoming a father, or being trapped in a war zone right up until he gets shot in the face, something he would presumably also be nonplussed about. I appreciated that the show let him be furious at Ellie the entire time he was in Seattle, and I thought it was kind of a cop out to have them make up immediately before the aforementioned face shooting.

But the main thing I thought the show did better than the game was the Ellie/Dina relationship. I really wanted to like it, too - it was a big triple A game with central f/f relationship - but the pregnancy plot twist was one of the spoilers that got leaked, and I was immediately so cross that I forgot to care that Joel died. I hate the 'unknowingly pregnant when they get together' storyline that was for a while endemic in f/f stories so much; I think I would hate it a lot less if even 5% of the time it ended in 'Look, I like you, but this relationship is a minute and a half old, and I don't want to be a parent' but, nope, it was always insta family.

I feel like I should clarify, because when I was talking about Andor I was kvetching about the Bix pregnancy storyline too, and, like, I like kids, I enjoy spending time around them - even right now, when my friend's kids are exclusively communicating in lines from the Minecraft movie - but, by God, I am a hard sell for stories about pregnancy.

Anyway, I liked the Ellie/Dina relationship a lot more on the show. The actress who played Dina was probably the MVP of the season, the actors had great chemistry, and I really liked the change where it was Dina who was with Joel when he ran into Abby's crew, it gave her a reason to go with Ellie to Seattle other than just because she's the love interest. Changing the speed at which Ellie and Dina's relationship developed so that they didn't properly get together until after they both knew Dina was pregnant changed that story from one I hated to one I merely disliked. I actually kinda liked Ellie's 'I'm gonna be a dad' line, both because I thought it was a cool line, and for Bella Ramsey's delivery, but it didn't solve the underlying problem for me, that show!Ellie, even more than Ellie from the games, does not seem like someone who wants to be a parent at nineteen or would be in any way good at it.

I badly wanted to be proved wrong, but I still think Kaitlyn Deaver has been horribly miscast. And, like, I don't want to slight her, she's been excellent in pretty much everything else i've seen her in, but her casting as Abby only makes sense to me if I assume she was slotted in as Abby after ageing out of playing Ellie (presumably without auditioning anyone else for Abby.)

The pacing was also weird as balls. Seven is an odd number of episodes, and if you're determined to keep the main character switch, why not just do one season of 12/14 episodes? You could even have a hiatus over the summer if you wanted to differentiate them.

The switch to Abby's perspective on the same three days, something that barely worked in the game, if that, given how divisive it was, is not something that is going to work when the show comes back in 18-24 months. And it feels like at least someone involved knew that, which is why the big emotional beats of the back half of the game (why Abby killed Joel/that Joel and Ellie were trying to patch things up) got moved up, because who's going to remember and/or care in two years?

What else? Let's see.

The converse of it all. I understand that Ellie, not unlike myself, is trapped in the terrible fashion choices of 2003, but trainers with no grip, no ankle support, and which rot if you get them wet are a terrible choice of footwear if your day job is fighting zombies in the snow.

Also, the amount of abuse that got thrown Ramsey's way, and HBO's lack of any kind of a response does not bode well for what, if any, safeguarding measures are being taken to protect the kids in the misbegotten HP reboot. God, that show is so fucked...

(no subject)

May. 27th, 2025 07:39 am
skygiants: shiny metal Ultraman with a Colonel Sanders beard and crown (yes minister)
[personal profile] skygiants
I've had great luck in the past with the sort of kdrama in which an angry immortal supernatural woman has to hang out in contemporary Seoul with a nice mortal boy. We were hoping The Judge From Hell would be that sort of kdrama, and, technically, it is; I think in its heart it would love to be Hotel del Luna. Unfortunately, it has also decided that what it wants to be is a violent revenge fantasy with incoherent and punitive ethics. Interspersed with wacky shenanigans! and a healthy dose of Catholicism?

Okay, so the premise: our heroine is Justitia, the DEMON JUDGE of the UNDERWORLD, THIRD IN LINE to the THRONE OF HELL, whose job is to sentence unrepentant murderers to unending torments. However, when a nice young judge gets murdered and accidentally ends up in her domain instead of the lesser hell where she belongs, Justitia refuses to listen to her pleas of innocence, gets ready to sentence her anyway, and promptly gets her wrist slapped by her superiors: she's gotten complacent! Time to go to Earth, wearing the body of the dead judge, and learn! about JUSTICE!!!

Given that Justitia's initial mistake involved accidentally sentencing an innocent person, you might be forgiven for thinking that Justitia's job on Earth might involve perhaps getting justice for the wrongly accused, or learning to temper justice with mercy and a little bit of nuance, or even uncovering faults and corruption within the justice system as it exists. haha! no. Justitia's job is to hit a quota of Unrepentent, Unforgiven Murderers On Earth and sentence them to unending torment, just like in her day job. She does this by chasing them around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimic the things they have done to their victims and beating them up, then stamping them on the forehead with a little stamp that says GEHENNA while then the doors of hell open and an ominous voice roars GEHENNA!!!! and they get sucked into hell. We did not enjoy the excruciating sequences of murderers being chased around a sequence of nightmare scenarios that mimicked the things they had done to their victims, which the show obviously wants us to find cathartic and satisfying. We did enjoy the ominous voice that roared GEHENNA!!!! It made us laugh every time.

this got long but tbh not as long as it could have been. this show was so incoherent )

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