lydamorehouse: (temporary incoherent rage)
 ...I'm going to blow a gasket.

I realize that when people talk about Bush Senior as a decent guy, what they mean is that, in comparison to the inhuman trash fire that currently holds the highest office in the nation, he looks pretty good.  I'll give them that.

But don't tell me he wasn't a racist. Have we forgotten Willie Horton

Don't tell me that he was some kind of unifier, unless you mean that he unified straight, cis people in their hatred of GLBTQ+ folks and their willingness to turn a blind eye on all the people dying of AIDs. Let me remind us all that that real people died. Lots of MY FRIENDS did not "survive" this particular terrible presidency.  Don't forget that some of us dumped our dead on George H. W. Bush's lawn to try to get him to acknowledge our right to exist.

Bush Senior was not a man of peace. Have we forgotten "Operation: Desert Storm"? The civilians killed--targeted intentionally?

I haven't.

And hearing his voice again is f*cking triggering. And I'm not even kidding.

I have to admit that I had a small meltdown about this in my coffee shop this morning. My radio station, which is normally far enough left that I don't have to deal with people saying nice things about a horrible politician, was all "but, the civility!"  And then, on top of that, I heard that tomorrow was going to be a national day of mourning  for this... person... and I wouldn't be able to get my mail because all of a sudden Bush Senior is some kind of saint....  AND I LOST MY FLIPPING MIND.

I ended my little rant with: "Americans have the collective memory of a... SQUIRREL." One of the other regular patrons there pulled down a 3-D printed 'Trump as squirrel' model and slammed it on the counter playfully. it broke the mood, thank gods, and I was able to laugh, because OMG. This is like when Reagan died and it was all that 'great orator' bull crap. Next, there will be airports named after this person and we're all going to have to act like HISTORY ISN'T A THING.

The problem is that Trump is such a nightmare that if Dick Cheney or Henry Kissinger died tomorrow, people will be like, "Remember when the opposition was SMART???" And, I'll be in the corner screaming: SURE SMART, BUT ALSO EVIL AF!!!!

So, that's been my morning.

How are you?

On the other hand, one of the baristas at Claddaugh took an amazing picture of the coffee shop right after the snow on Sunday:

downtown store fronts in snow

The Xcel Enegy Homesmart repair guys just left my house. Our drier decided to stop drying. This happens every so often and it's the kind of repair that doesn't necessarily make me think it's time for a new drier, if only because I think that fuses just generally have a lifespan, you know? The thing we have to save up for is our furnace. That thing is going to go one of these years and the folks that we have come out and inspect it are starting to mutter things like, "Mmmm, maybe consider a future replacement" and, the last guy, "OH MY GOD."  I mean, it's possible he was talking about the state of the basement in general, but I think he was commenting on the age of most of the fixtures.

On Sunday, we spent the day making our "small" batch of flieschkueckle

hundreds of little meat pies on the stovetop.

We always feel pretty good around 1 pm when we're mostly done rolling out the dough and filling up the little crescent pies, but I was still frying these babies until 6 pm.  I got a lot of reading in, which is good, but... well, now we have food in the freezer. There's something in my lizard brain that still feels deep satisfaction putting away stores at this time of year. I mean, sure I could pop down to the grocery store at any point, but my LARDER IS STOCKED. *chest thumping!*

Plus, these things are so delicious and they really do make great little lunch treats to send along with Mason or Shawn. In the complete perversion of ethnicities/cultural appropriation, I pack a flieschkuechkle in Shawn' bento.

Anyway, hope you all have a lower blood pressure (and cholesterol) than I do!

Nerd Day

Sep. 29th, 2017 12:52 pm
lydamorehouse: (ticked off Ichigo)
 Today, as I'm sure many of you know, the Nintendo dropped the SNES.  I spent a good portion of my morning attempting to get one, always arriving as the cashier said, "Sorry, my last one just walked out the door." The worst part being that I could have stood in line at GameStop, which opened later, BUT I had a press showing of Professor Marston and the Wonder Woman to get to at 10 am at the Lagoon Theatre, which I got to go to as part of my gig as a comic book reviewer for Twin Cities Geeks.

I can't talk about the movie until my review goes up, but I can tell you about my movie-going experience.  

At first, I didn't think I was going to make it. OMG. Lately traffic HATES ME, PERSONALLY. In between darting into various Target Superstores and Gamestops between here and Uptown, I managed to screw up my exit. Instead of taking 94 to Hennepin like I'd planned, I was thinking so hard about the SNES that I ended up on 35 W, which local folk will know, is under deep, deep construction.  The exit at 36th was blocked so I had to drive WAY OUT of my way at get off at 46th.  I managed work my way back, fighting Uptown traffic now, to park in the parking ramp behind the Lagoon (which ended up costing about as much as a ticket) and then it looked like no one was going to let me in to the actual theater. It was dark. The doors were locked.  But, eventually someone came and opened the door.  He still looked dubious about letting me in, but, apparently, the magic words were, "Press screening at 10?"

I checked in with the "woman with the clipboard" as instructed and was directed to theatre 5.  I haven't been to the Lagoon in forever. The theaters are small and dim. The seats are old and squeaky.

But it was just me and two other people...

...and that was really f*cking cool.

When I used to review movies for focusPOINT back in the late Cretaceous, I had a really hard time not loving everything I saw. I might be one of the only professional, paid reviewers on the planet who gave a positive review to the Matthew Broderick remake of Godzilla. Probably the thing most people remember about that movie, besides how (nearly) universally it was panned, was its poorly executed "Size Matters" ad campaign.

Anyway, part of the problem, I realized later when I found myself gushing about the Avengers remake (another film all my sensible colleagues panned, and I don't mean the Marvel one, obviously, I mean the one based on the TV series) is that it's just SO SUPER COOL to be the first to see a movie, ANY MOVIE, and it's free, right? So you don't have this whole "Jeez, I paid how much for THAT???!!" thing going on in your head, like, ever.

Plus, did I mention how super-secret you feel, getting in to somewhere no one else does? Way ahead of the official release date?  And, I realize there are people who do this for the Star Tribune, the New York Times or whatever and they've seen it all, and they're all so jaded, but even after a year of doing it for focusPOINT, I was like 'STILL AWESOME, SO, SO AWESOME. I LOVED THIS FILM, I LOVE ALL FILMS!!!"

Yeah, so, I'll have to remember to temper that impulse when I finally sit down to write my actual review.  

I drove home still attempting to find the SNES, but, at this point it was after noon, so all hope was lost.  At one Target they looked up to see who might have SNESs and I called around. The Roseville electronics department just answered the phone without even a hello, only saying, "We are sold out of the Super Nintendo Entertainment Systems." As sad as that was to hear, it still cracked me up.

Such a classic nerd day, though, don't you think?
lydamorehouse: (more renji art)
I had one panel today, at 8:30 at night, which may not seem like a "late night panel" to you folks, but 8:30 PM skirts the edges of my bedtime. I'm an unrepentant lark, my friends. I'm often in bed by 8:00 pm. Thus, perhaps, needless to say, this was not my best panel of the con so far. It was called, "They Came from Fandom..." and it was ostensibly about how some of us professional writers started out as fans (or, as in my case, re-embraced fandom AFTER going pro.)

What it sort of became was Fandom 101, aka "Back in the late Jurassic, before the Internet, when the word 'fandom' meant community, not genre...."

That was a fine topic, but I didn't feel I had a lot to contribute to the discussion. In all honesty, even if we had stayed on topic, I'm not sure what I would have had to say about the subject. I mean, in some ways, it seems like it ought to be a gimme, as in: if you don't love SF, what the f*ck makes you think you can write it? What is strange to me is that, apparently, there are SF/F writers out there who are somehow NOT fans.

I guess the thing is that "fan" is described differently these days. But, back in the late Jurassic, it kind of just meant you read the stuff and liked it. I didn't really become active in the con scene until I was starting to pursue a career as a writer, so in some ways I didn't come from the kind of FANDOM that some of the panelist were talking about. I did write fanfic, but, back in the late Jurassic, there wasn't an internet for me to post it to, so all my Anne McCaffery and Katherine Kurtz fanfic stayed in the notebooks they were handwritten into. I also really remember being counseled not to act too fannish on panels (specifically, I got the whole "dress for the job you want" lecture, with the implication that if you showed up to con cosplaying, you weren't serious about being a writer.)

I tried to talk about this a little on the panel, because even though the Minneapolis/St. Paul fan community is very accepting of fannish pros, I'm not sure it's honest to say that you get taken as seriously sitting on a panel at Anime Detour in your shinigami costume as you do dressed in corporate drag. In fact, I felt a wave of 'and you are...?' from my fellow panelist when I came and sat down next to him at Detour, because I was full-on cosplaying. Despite 15 books in print, the book (panelist) really is still judged by the cover (costume).

Which was why, for the most part, Detour was a much more freeing, fun experience for me. I'm not in costume at all this weekend, nor will I be. Because at this con, I'm a pro, not a fan.

This was also one of those panels that suffered from CONvergence's policy of not always naming a moderator. We ended up letting the person who volunteered for the job have it, and so far, in my experience, that's often the LAST PERSON WHO SHOULD HAVE THE JOB. The volunteer moderator did a pretty good job of asking questions, but she was willing to let the topic meander and I was just not up to the task of herding cats (which I might have been if I had something to say, but I really didn't feel like I did.)

So, it was kind of meh.

At one point, one of the panelists brought up the idea of the permeability of the membrane... as in, how easy is it to pass between pro and fan? I thought this was an interesting concept, but we never really explored it.

I'm bummed because it was another all-star cast. I almost always love being on panels with Emma Bull. Catherine Lundoff is a bright, interesting woman who is always a pleasure to talk to. Patrick Neilson Hayden is, of course, a giant in the field, being, as he is, a senior editor at Tor Books, but also a long time fan. Joan Marie Verba likewise is often a great panelist, but for whatever reason, none of us entirely clicked.

For myself, I blame the hour. If the panel had happened when I arrived at the con at 1:00 pm, it would have been smashing, because I would have been at my peak.

Probably the best panel was the accidental Marvel Movie panel that happened when I had dinner with [livejournal.com profile] naomikritzer, Will Alexander, and [livejournal.com profile] seanmmurphy, which wasn't a panel at all, but a bunch of us getting wound up and fannish about all the latest films and comparing them to the comic book canon.

I attended a lot of panels, but I probably should have gone to Theatre Nippon. I'm probably not going to catch any anime movies this con because I'm planning to skip tomorrow. I'll try to do a write up of the panels I attended because I did actually take a few notes on thoughts I had, but it's like 1:30 in the morning and my brain has stopped "braining" as the kids might say....
lydamorehouse: (Default)
I still have nine tetra but I'm not going to jinx them by celebrating their recovery too soon. After all, the three of us are heading out of town soon and the last time we did that with tetra in the house, I came home to a moldy clump of them wadded together on a plant. (Something about tetras and mold, I guess.) But fingers crossed, knocking on wood, and all that supersitous stuff until we get home again.

According to the moon app on Tate's blog today is New Moon and it is, apparently, not a good day to start any "projects that require effort to complete." I guess I'd better hurry up and finish the revisions on her novel before 10:30 pm or whenever it's officially New Moon then, eh?

I'm having a bear of a time concentrating today. It might be the weather. It really feels ready to storm, but it's not there yet. Big, fluffy white clouds are blocking the direct sunlight, and so it's the kind of day you find yourself squinting even though it's not really sunny out, you know? The humidity is high. Everything seems to be ready to do something, but not yet committed.

Sort of like me and writing.

As I drove into Mason's school today there were a lot of police cars in the area. We arrived at our usual time 8:55 am, but the place seemed kind of deserted. Usually there are a ton of kids waiting outside for the bell to ring. I thought we were late when I didn't the usual crowd, but Ava and her dad were just getting out of their car (and you can almost set your watch to them, they're so punctual.) We all walked up to school together and Ava's dad and I chatted about the cop cars. He asked one of the ladies who usually corrals the kids about it and she said there was some "activity in the neighborhood" so they had to pull all the students inside. Once at the classroom we heard from one of the kids who is dropped off early for "Discovery Club," that they'd had to have a real lockdown.

Lockdowns are what kids practice in these days after the Columbine shootings. Fire drills, tornado warnings, and lockdowns. In a lockdown, according to Mason, the teachers lock the doors to their rooms and all the students hide behind a bookcase so that they can't be seen by anyone passing in the hallway.

Scary.

Especially to a five year old.

And then to find out they had to do one "for real." I felt for Dalton, the kid who had been at school early enough to have to take part in this. Mason tried to shrug it off, though I think he was nervous at the idea. As I left him with a kiss, I overheard some other students saying they'd heard it was an (armed?) burglar that the police were chasing. The school was being cautious.

Frankly, I'm down with that. But it really brings home how much more freaked out we are now-a-days versus when I was a kid. My biggest worry was a nuclear bomb dropped from Russia --which was freaky in its own way because it was so... out there and uncertain. I rarely worried about being ACTUALLY killed by anyone in school. I used to worry about being targetted as a nerd, although I was fairly oblivious to a lot of that being a girl. Our big weapon against each other was shunning. Girls didn't tend to hit so much as gossip and plot, especially in the late-70s/early 80s. Someone brought a knife to school once and there was always "drugs" out there, but no metal detectors or any of that.

I don't know where I'm going with this, just kind of a "huh."

June 2025

S M T W T F S
123 4 5 67
8 9 10 11 12 1314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 14th, 2025 10:30 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios
OSZAR »