Laughter Through Tears

I first tried watching Seven Dials a while ago, with my mother, but she got bored and quit partway through. I was intrigued, and I usually enjoy Agatha Christie adaptations, so I watched all three episodes today, back to back.

It has the bones of a rather fun and intriguing story with three potentially clever and compelling characters. But unfortunately, it is not that story. Instead, it's a bit plodding, misses many of its swings when it comes to emotional beats, and has overwritten dialogue of the kind that makes allegedly clever characters appear rather foolish. Helena Bonham Carter in particular was disgracefully wasted.

Although I wanted to like it, I found the whole thing to be rather a waste of time.

Currently, I'm working on writing three different things in (more or less) parallel. Two of them I can't talk about for reasons. The third is my (more-than-) half-finished Palia fic, which I expect to top out at 5 long-ish chapters, maybe six.

Meanwhile, I'm planning for a birthday when half the family is away on vacation.

I was watching Pantheon on my brother's recommendation, but I needed something more brain-turn-off-y, so now I'm rewatching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power for the first time in a bit. For something that hits so many of my sweet spots, I haven't rewatched it nearly as often as I might've expected. Maybe it's because of that middle season that was so short and wobbly. Which does not improve on rewatching, TBH.

I obviously had a bad couple of nights in terms of sleep etc., but I'm coping mainly by trying to distract myself.

Distractions I've indulged in:

1. Palia. Still very heavily playing this, especially this weekend, making up for the fact that I didn't play much over the week.

2. Reading the tagset/request summary for justmarriedexchange. Probably gonna sign up today or tomorrow, and yes, I did nom Palia, too.

3. Over the last week, I've watched enough Kruggsmash Dwarf Fortress videos that I had to talk myself down from getting the game (for reasons).

4. Finally watched the last season of Community. It sure is a bunch of television episodes.

5. Also catching up on the most recent season of Leverage: Redemption, and yes, there was a moment that made me scream at a pitch audible only to dogs.

6. When I fail to do these things, I read the news, which depresses me.

Monday through Thursday is the online convention event that's replacing the usual annual fall geek con, Icon, which takes place every year on the week-long holiday. Taking the con online has prompted the organizers to switch to a payment model where a one-time cover price gains the user access to all events, which has allowed me and my brother to make last-minute, stress-free decisions about what to watch. For example, there was a GOH event on Monday that I had thought about attending, but it was quite late at night and I was tired. I ended up watching two events on Monday (not quite back-to-back) and two and a half on Tuesday.

Then I was going to take a break on Wednesday and do some intensive writing on The Flower of Fairmont, which is getting very close to being ready for a demo, but alas. After a migraine on Monday night (surprise!) and a worse migraine late Tuesday night (my fault, for playing too much Skyrim), I was a wreck on Wednesday. Not the worst rebound I've ever had, but I was not good to work. And that's with being at home and having all the resources available to make things easier -- shades down, dimmed screen, low volume. So Wednesday was not the productive day I had hoped for, and the first week of October passed without me making much progress on my writing goals.

I did get some stuff done this week, but much less exciting.

Today I have stuff I need to do around the house, but I am also going to try and write a little. The only event I definitely want to watch is in the evening, so I can just make that my dinner break, instead of TV. Oh, I also started watching the Mars show, and I found it... watchable, I guess? I'm not super into it, but I still enjoy the sciency aspects.

Fairmont is still pretty far from being done, but I'm making progress on chapter 4 of TC. Slower than I'd like, but progress.

I'm 4 episodes into Tales of Arcadia: Wizards and I'm not sure I trust these developments. There is a lot of bait running around but I'm not rising to it, not yet. I've been in this situation before. On several counts, even.

I know I'll regret it if I binge the whole thing in a day, but on the other hand, I'm really curious.

I went to the doctor yesterday and got some meds. And I'm going to my regular doctor tomorrow, to hand her the documents from the other doctor, and... get some more meds?

It's apparently the flu, which is an uncomfortable balance of "it's not that bad" and "but it could get a lot worse so be vigilant" and "but also there's not a lot you can do". There's... not a lot I can do other than drinking tea and trying to breathe properly. And keeping an eye on my fever to make sure I don't develop any complications.

I'm not working but I pass the time by watching TV, writing fanfic, and reading shitty romance games on my phone.

I have no idea when I'll feel better, and thus no idea when I'll be able to get back to writing, but at least I'm not gainfully employed which means I'm not feeling the pressure to go back out into the rain, and I don't need a doctor's note to stay home until I'm well again.

Today I watched all of the new season of She-Ra and I am experiencing... several emotions.

fanfic fandoms are like watching an adult try to color with crayons.

I mostly watch stuff on Netflix so that I can have something on while I'm eating dinner, or catch up on stuff at my mother's because she has satellite and gets a lot of the shows that Netflix doesn't stock in Israel. So I'm often not even up to date with shows that I do follow, because streaming is frankly more trouble than it's worth, most of the time. And my total inability to keep track of time means I never know what's coming when unless my brother keeps me up to date.

That said...

Two weeks ago I accidentally watched the entire run of the new She-Ra in the course of a single Saturday. And then this Wednesday I somehow watched the entire run of The Dragon Prince in a single evening. Apparently I watch cartoons again? And it's cool, because it works for me right now. So now it's Saturday afternoon and I'm gonna start watching Trollhunters, because why not.

I watched most of Punisher in a few days and it wasn't half bad, but I think I sort of... forgot... to watch the very last episode.

After seeing Shohreh Aghdashloo in Punisher and being delighted, I discussed it with my brother and he mentioned that she was also playing a major role in The Expanse. Which he'd been encouraging me to start watching for a while now. Since Shohreh Aghdashloo is the actual love of my life, and since I developed a mystery virus that laid me low for a day and a half, I ended up marathoning most of the first season. Fast enough that I had trouble distinguishing between the episodes (thank you, Netflix autoplay). And despite the fact that the first few episodes are so dense and complex I alternated between watching them and reading the (extremely detailed, slightly analytical) episode breakdowns on the fandom wiki.

The Expanse is like Killjoys, except it's wearing a suit and tie instead of jeans and a tube-top. That is, TEX is ostensibly hard sci-fi, and lends huge weight to things like the effects of gravity on bone density (even if it's still trying to convince me that you can wave a magnet at someone and turn them into a sociopath). Meanwhile Killjoys leans pretty hard space opera, at least the way I see it. But the commonalities are more important (to my eye) than the differences: terraforming as a vehicle of social inequality, space miners as a pervasive blue-collar underclass, lots of parallel approaches to social issues.

Not to mention the seemingly sudden introduction of a genre-shifting plot twist, which in retrospect appears highly foreshadowed.

I feel like there's more to dig into here. Not sure I'm well-equipped to do the digging, though, and both shows have been around long enough. I can hope that someone smarter than me has gone and done that analysis already, so that I can simply bask in its glory instead of breaking my head trying to figure out what I'm looking at.

My thoughts are too disorganized for a proper blog post.

Other shows that I am still following: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, The Good Place, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.