And through the squall the course stays true
I slept ten hours last night. I didn't even wake up around dawn. I woke in the early afternoon to a light pattern filtering around the door that reminded me of the late lamented Dueling Dragons/Dragon Challenge which I rode for the first and only time with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch when we visited Orlando in 2012. I took a picture with my desperately grainy phone because I knew the minute I moved the door to retrieve my real camera, I'd lose it. Someday I will live again in an apartment where it is possible to hang art on the bedroom walls.
I have spent the afternoon doing almost nothing except talking to people on the internet and drinking horchata from La Posada in Magoun Square, from which we ordered dinner last night based onrushthatspeaks' recommendation and by which we were rewarded with a damn near lifetime supply of pupusas revueltas and pork ribs drenched in thick dark mole poblano and falling off the bone. Rob said that I made such happy noises over the horchata, I sounded like one of the cats porcupining over a treat. It seemed almost impossibly delicious. Yesterday I was so tired that while I fell appreciatively on the food when it arrived, I had not noticed I was hungry until that had been the case for at least twelve hours.
The thing I was also too tired to remember to mention about "The Dead, the Wide-Eyed and the Legless" is that it is the first fiction of any kind I have managed to write this year since "Tea with the Earl of Twilight." I believe it is also the first time I have participated in any kind of fest or exchange—my fic-writing is so irregular and randomly inspired, I have never felt comfortable committing to anything that involves a signup or deadlines. So that was something of a big deal, camouflaged by unnecessary levels of panic. I have written so very little this year.
One of the reasons I feel like such a terrible zamler is that the world is full of awful things which I used to document more of my reactions to and now I feel more as though it is taken as read that we are all trying to wave while drowning and any hand flashing out of the waves is the important thing, but it does leave gaps in the record.
spatch when we visited Orlando in 2012. I took a picture with my desperately grainy phone because I knew the minute I moved the door to retrieve my real camera, I'd lose it. Someday I will live again in an apartment where it is possible to hang art on the bedroom walls.
I have spent the afternoon doing almost nothing except talking to people on the internet and drinking horchata from La Posada in Magoun Square, from which we ordered dinner last night based on
rushthatspeaks' recommendation and by which we were rewarded with a damn near lifetime supply of pupusas revueltas and pork ribs drenched in thick dark mole poblano and falling off the bone. Rob said that I made such happy noises over the horchata, I sounded like one of the cats porcupining over a treat. It seemed almost impossibly delicious. Yesterday I was so tired that while I fell appreciatively on the food when it arrived, I had not noticed I was hungry until that had been the case for at least twelve hours.The thing I was also too tired to remember to mention about "The Dead, the Wide-Eyed and the Legless" is that it is the first fiction of any kind I have managed to write this year since "Tea with the Earl of Twilight." I believe it is also the first time I have participated in any kind of fest or exchange—my fic-writing is so irregular and randomly inspired, I have never felt comfortable committing to anything that involves a signup or deadlines. So that was something of a big deal, camouflaged by unnecessary levels of panic. I have written so very little this year.
One of the reasons I feel like such a terrible zamler is that the world is full of awful things which I used to document more of my reactions to and now I feel more as though it is taken as read that we are all trying to wave while drowning and any hand flashing out of the waves is the important thing, but it does leave gaps in the record.
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I'm so glad!
The mycology was equal parts horrifying and eerie beautiful, and the part that had f*d Tosh up was pretty hard stuff--no wonder she wants to get hammered.
Yeah, it is emphatically not a grimdark show, at least at this phase of its existence, but it is often dark. It's also just as often completely ridiculous, or deeply moving, or simultaneously all of the above.
Nice.
Thank you!
I am pleased with the description of Owen because I consider Burn Gorman to be an extraordinarily beautiful person, but he reminds me of Leslie Howard in that I am amazed and delighted that so much of the rest of the planet agrees with me, because I am pretty sure that by objective standards he has kind of a weird face.
We could all use some workmates like Owen.
I love him. He spends much of the first season being a self-destructive trash fire of a human being whose best qualities come out in his professional life: he is a damned good doctor and his healing instincts kick in so hard that he'll do his best to save the life of someone he just stood down from doing violence to himself and then he'll snap something unforgivable at one of his teammates beause they were just thinking about asking if he was all right and it's all so desperately self-inflicted. Refreshingly, by the start of the second season—to a significant extent as a result of the events of the first-season finale—he has begun to sort himself out to the point where he may always be a reflexively prickly, defensive cynic with a very mixed record of major life decisions, but he can now actually acknowledge his relationships with his teammates as caring or affectionate or at least collegial without always needing to have a get-out-of-emotions-free card in his wallet in case of emergencies. He even gets around to agreeing to go on a date with Tosh, which would have been unthinkable in the first season for a host of reasons. And then he dies and sort of comes back and his relationship with everything including himself goes to hell and he has to rebuild all of it and decide what's worth going on with and I don't care if it's ironic, I find it powerful in the ways where sometimes it is impossible to separate the damage that people endure from the ways they find to grow from it while also understanding that having to endure it in the first place sucks. He handles being dead about as well as most people would to begin with, which is to say terribly. It gets better.
If you decide to watch the show, my advice is to treat the first two episodes as dry runs for the real thing, even though the first episode itself is actually invaluable as set-up for later developments; I wound up describing them after the fact as proto-Torchwood because it was possible to discern the kind of tone and ensemble dynamic the showrunner and writers were aiming for, but they absolutely did not land it straight off the bat. In the third episode, the show feels like it suddenly snaps into focus: the characters feel like themselves rather than experimental sketches, the goofiness and the darkess start playing together instead of fighting for dominance, and the rest of the season is not without its rocky moments (or episodes), but it never again feels so wildly off-kilter from its own core. I have no idea how that happens with actual broadcast television rather than unaired pilots, but here we are. Fortunately, I started with the first-season finale and watched the first half of the second season before going back for the rest of the first season and catching up from there, so I knew what it was supposed to look like and could therefore afford to wait for it to get its head on straight.
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Fortunately, he does have his teammates, and they make their assorted love languages unambiguously clear. (Why didn't this show have a third season with this cast?)