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l33tminion) wrote2024-09-24 04:12 pm
l33tminion) wrote2024-09-24 04:12 pm
Fall Fluff Fun
What's new, people!
Things have been busy, busy on the parenting front. Last week Julie had a series of late nights, followed by being out of town Friday to Sunday for a wedding, so it was a solo weekend for me and Erica. Saturday, I took her to her first of the fall session of swim lessons at the Somerville Y. In the afternoon, there was the Union Square Fluff Festival. It was wet this year, but not as rainy as last year when they pushed the festival off from a rainy Saturday to a forecast-less-rainy but ultimately even rainier Sunday. (Of course, since they kept to the schedule this year, Sunday was clear.)
(And then a picture of Erica at one of the carnival games at the festival ended up in a little photo insert on the front of the Metro section of the Globe. It was a good photo.)
Sunday morning, Erica convinced me to take her to Target for craft (slime) supplies, and we ran into acquaintances along the way, baby Ruthie and her dad, Zeke. Sunday afternoon, we went climbing.
Yesterday evening, Erica was at George's house after school (once again trading off days with their family, this time Monday/Tuesday). So I got to go out to dinner with Julie and have the moules frites at Juliet. Which I'd been really wanting since I saw that on the menu, it was as good as I anticipated.
Today, I ran into our old housemate, Josh, on the way home from work. He seems well.
Maybe I'll do a little media posting, haven't gotten to that in ages:
Many weeks ago, I finished watching A Place Further Than the Universe an anime with the "four cute girls doing cute things" formula where here "cute thing" is "expedition to Antarctica". It's a calm story, not a survival thriller, it's "more about the journey" perspective is focused enough that it takes the characters nine out of twelve episodes to even get to Antarctica. It's not such a stand-out, but good if you're in the mood for a fairly lighthearted, character-driven story about making new friends and achieving (possibly first finding) your idiosyncratic dreams together.
I'm almost done reading S by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst. This very strange book is a false document novel that takes the form of the book Ship of Theseus by (fictional) author VM Straka in (and about) which the two protagonists of S are communicating in marginalia and inserts. So we have a story within Ship of Theseus (that is, physically contained within the covers of the book) in which Ship of Theseus is a story-within-the-story (about the book) and also story-within-the-story-within-the-story (about the book's covert meanings and messages). It's creative, quite difficult to read, and gets away reasonably well defying the advice of never trying to render verbatim the contents of a work of purportedly great literature that exists in the setting that you, as an author, are actually writing. I'm pretty sure that once I finish that last chapter I'm going to seek out a lot of deep-dive video essays digging into this one.
I also just recently started watching Scavengers Reign. That is an absolutely brilliant sci-fi animated series, originally a Max exclusive, now on Netflix. The animation is just gorgeous, and I'm enjoying the characters in the story. The show takes the alien biology of the world the protagonists are stranded on into sometimes magical-realism territory, but the alien ecology is the real hard sci-fi star of the show. The setting is just full of complicated webs of relationships between planet Vesta's various organisms and their environment, it's awe-inspiring and beautiful and fascinating.
Things have been busy, busy on the parenting front. Last week Julie had a series of late nights, followed by being out of town Friday to Sunday for a wedding, so it was a solo weekend for me and Erica. Saturday, I took her to her first of the fall session of swim lessons at the Somerville Y. In the afternoon, there was the Union Square Fluff Festival. It was wet this year, but not as rainy as last year when they pushed the festival off from a rainy Saturday to a forecast-less-rainy but ultimately even rainier Sunday. (Of course, since they kept to the schedule this year, Sunday was clear.)
(And then a picture of Erica at one of the carnival games at the festival ended up in a little photo insert on the front of the Metro section of the Globe. It was a good photo.)
Sunday morning, Erica convinced me to take her to Target for craft (slime) supplies, and we ran into acquaintances along the way, baby Ruthie and her dad, Zeke. Sunday afternoon, we went climbing.
Yesterday evening, Erica was at George's house after school (once again trading off days with their family, this time Monday/Tuesday). So I got to go out to dinner with Julie and have the moules frites at Juliet. Which I'd been really wanting since I saw that on the menu, it was as good as I anticipated.
Today, I ran into our old housemate, Josh, on the way home from work. He seems well.
Maybe I'll do a little media posting, haven't gotten to that in ages:
Many weeks ago, I finished watching A Place Further Than the Universe an anime with the "four cute girls doing cute things" formula where here "cute thing" is "expedition to Antarctica". It's a calm story, not a survival thriller, it's "more about the journey" perspective is focused enough that it takes the characters nine out of twelve episodes to even get to Antarctica. It's not such a stand-out, but good if you're in the mood for a fairly lighthearted, character-driven story about making new friends and achieving (possibly first finding) your idiosyncratic dreams together.
I'm almost done reading S by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst. This very strange book is a false document novel that takes the form of the book Ship of Theseus by (fictional) author VM Straka in (and about) which the two protagonists of S are communicating in marginalia and inserts. So we have a story within Ship of Theseus (that is, physically contained within the covers of the book) in which Ship of Theseus is a story-within-the-story (about the book) and also story-within-the-story-within-the-story (about the book's covert meanings and messages). It's creative, quite difficult to read, and gets away reasonably well defying the advice of never trying to render verbatim the contents of a work of purportedly great literature that exists in the setting that you, as an author, are actually writing. I'm pretty sure that once I finish that last chapter I'm going to seek out a lot of deep-dive video essays digging into this one.
I also just recently started watching Scavengers Reign. That is an absolutely brilliant sci-fi animated series, originally a Max exclusive, now on Netflix. The animation is just gorgeous, and I'm enjoying the characters in the story. The show takes the alien biology of the world the protagonists are stranded on into sometimes magical-realism territory, but the alien ecology is the real hard sci-fi star of the show. The setting is just full of complicated webs of relationships between planet Vesta's various organisms and their environment, it's awe-inspiring and beautiful and fascinating.