![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Agents of chaos going out through the world
Tonight ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and I made saffron rice with barberries, Quorn (in place of chicken, so that we could feed it to gaudior) braised with shallots and more saffron, and soft-boiled eggs. This would have been an ideal dinner if the recipe for the rice had not one hundred percent lied when it said it took an hour. We ate around ten o'clock at night. The crisp golden crust at the bottom of the pot would almost certainly have worked better if we'd had basmati rice instead of glutinous, but it seems to have tasted good to the people who could chew it. Oh, and we have leftovers because we accidentally made at least twice as much as we needed for three people. Really everything about this recipe went wrong except that it was delicious. I suppose that is the important part.
1. I haven't a clue if it's any good, but this gifset makes me want to watch The Librarians (2014–). If anyone has recreated the Labyrinth of Minos in a skyscraper in Boston, I want to know about it.
2. So through most of high school and into college I believed that all of my favorite characters were doomed. Bad luck, bad choices, bad plotting, whatever. If a character caught my interest, I could feel confident they were headed for a bad end. As it turns out, the vast majority of characters for whom I have felt an affinity across the years do not die or even meet with tragedy in the course of their stories, but I understand how I got the impression: in high school, I was heavily into Babylon 5 (1994–1998). Also I suspect in hindsight that a preference for morally ambiguous characters and outsiders of all kinds may have weighted the scales a little. But I came to understand that it was a mistaken belief, and I was all right with that, and anyone played by Elisha Cook, Jr. should not be taken as an argument to the contrary. I just found that out that a character who featured in the last Magic expansion block I really paid attention to—right around the time they were starting to play with story arcs; he had an interesting face in several illustrations and all his flavor text was cynical—has a horrifically depressing storyline if you follow it through, which I didn't, because I lost track of the game around the time I started college. Maybe high-school-aged me was on to something after all.
3. What with all the film noir recently, I seem to have compiled a short list of songs I associate with the noir aesthetic, despite absolutely none of them having been written in the appropriate decades. More accurately, they've been changing off in my head for the last couple of days and I am hoping this will exorcise them. Enjoy.
Michael Penn, "Walter Reed"
All I want to do is hide
It's graduation day
And everything I learned inside
Didn't seem to pay
I've had my fill of palm trees
And lighting up Grauman's Chinese
Thea Gilmore, "The Wrong Side"
It's a hard case to make
And I'm hard news and I'm going to break now
They got you walking on the wrong side
They got you walking with me
Saint Eve, "While the City Sleeps"
Right on time—think fast
It happens in a flash
A lifetime of regret begins ten seconds in the past
Timber Timbre, "Bad Ritual"
There's a history in pictures
There is evidence in boxes
There is proof of your love for him long after it's dead
Tom Waits, "Gun Street Girl"
Now the rain like gravel on an old tin roof
Burlington Northern pulling out of the world
Now a head full of bourbon and a dream in the straw
And a Gun Street girl was the cause of it all
Beady Sea, "It'll Be Alright"
If you can't go around, you have to go through
If I can't have her, then I guess I'll take you
So breathe it deep, it'll be all right
One more time, it's going to be all right
rushthatspeaks and I made saffron rice with barberries, Quorn (in place of chicken, so that we could feed it to gaudior) braised with shallots and more saffron, and soft-boiled eggs. This would have been an ideal dinner if the recipe for the rice had not one hundred percent lied when it said it took an hour. We ate around ten o'clock at night. The crisp golden crust at the bottom of the pot would almost certainly have worked better if we'd had basmati rice instead of glutinous, but it seems to have tasted good to the people who could chew it. Oh, and we have leftovers because we accidentally made at least twice as much as we needed for three people. Really everything about this recipe went wrong except that it was delicious. I suppose that is the important part.1. I haven't a clue if it's any good, but this gifset makes me want to watch The Librarians (2014–). If anyone has recreated the Labyrinth of Minos in a skyscraper in Boston, I want to know about it.
2. So through most of high school and into college I believed that all of my favorite characters were doomed. Bad luck, bad choices, bad plotting, whatever. If a character caught my interest, I could feel confident they were headed for a bad end. As it turns out, the vast majority of characters for whom I have felt an affinity across the years do not die or even meet with tragedy in the course of their stories, but I understand how I got the impression: in high school, I was heavily into Babylon 5 (1994–1998). Also I suspect in hindsight that a preference for morally ambiguous characters and outsiders of all kinds may have weighted the scales a little. But I came to understand that it was a mistaken belief, and I was all right with that, and anyone played by Elisha Cook, Jr. should not be taken as an argument to the contrary. I just found that out that a character who featured in the last Magic expansion block I really paid attention to—right around the time they were starting to play with story arcs; he had an interesting face in several illustrations and all his flavor text was cynical—has a horrifically depressing storyline if you follow it through, which I didn't, because I lost track of the game around the time I started college. Maybe high-school-aged me was on to something after all.
3. What with all the film noir recently, I seem to have compiled a short list of songs I associate with the noir aesthetic, despite absolutely none of them having been written in the appropriate decades. More accurately, they've been changing off in my head for the last couple of days and I am hoping this will exorcise them. Enjoy.
Michael Penn, "Walter Reed"
All I want to do is hide
It's graduation day
And everything I learned inside
Didn't seem to pay
I've had my fill of palm trees
And lighting up Grauman's Chinese
Thea Gilmore, "The Wrong Side"
It's a hard case to make
And I'm hard news and I'm going to break now
They got you walking on the wrong side
They got you walking with me
Saint Eve, "While the City Sleeps"
Right on time—think fast
It happens in a flash
A lifetime of regret begins ten seconds in the past
Timber Timbre, "Bad Ritual"
There's a history in pictures
There is evidence in boxes
There is proof of your love for him long after it's dead
Tom Waits, "Gun Street Girl"
Now the rain like gravel on an old tin roof
Burlington Northern pulling out of the world
Now a head full of bourbon and a dream in the straw
And a Gun Street girl was the cause of it all
Beady Sea, "It'll Be Alright"
If you can't go around, you have to go through
If I can't have her, then I guess I'll take you
So breathe it deep, it'll be all right
One more time, it's going to be all right
no subject
It is good in the same way the movies are good, which is to say, it's a story about how you can save the world with your brain, and it doesn't take itself too seriously. (I think the first movie is the best Indiana Jones film after Raiders of the Lost Ark and Last Crusade.) With the show, I'm convinced they came up with the character concepts for the three trainee Librarians, then rotated them one notch around the circle: the girl is the mathematician instead of the art history major; the Asian guy is the roguish thief instead of the mathematician; the white guy is the art history major instead of the roguish thief. There's a story element which is surprisingly serious, and handled with more genuine drama than I expected, in that the show had a chance to handwave the issue away and chose not to. I suspect that in the end they'll do something magical to solve the problem, because this is not the kind of story where heroes meet with tragic ends, but in the meanwhile they're showing a lot more respect toward the concept than I expected them to.
And yes: the Labyrinth of Minos, the Apple of Discord, deranged fairy tales, a haunted house, and Bruce Campbell as Santa Claus. All of which get dealt with by the characters being smart and using their knowledge of random stuff -- because that's how Librarians roll. I think it might entertain you greatly.
no subject
In a later scene, we cut back to him wrapping up what was evidently the most inspiring lecture the students have seen all year with a rant about the awesomeness of Capability Brown. In the words of Captain America: "I understood that reference."
no subject
+1.
no subject
I love a show that will take a brief detour for rants like that. :-)
no subject
In general I am more familiar with movies that came out forty years before my birth than I am with television that aired within the last five years, although it's not a constant: I am currently suffering from a simultaneous hiatus of Gravity Falls (2012–) and Steven Universe (2013–), which is just unfair. I had heard of The Librarians, but I had no compelling reasons to watch it until that gifset. It sounds like it might be fun and not very demanding in the same way that I have found the first season of seaQuest, which I should finish one of these days.
the girl is the mathematician instead of the art history major; the Asian guy is the roguish thief instead of the mathematician; the white guy is the art history major instead of the roguish thief.
That is attractive to me. I always like when stories recognize their stereotypes and then don't bother.
the Labyrinth of Minos, the Apple of Discord, deranged fairy tales, a haunted house, and Bruce Campbell as Santa Claus.
. . . yeah, okay.